Anchorage School Board: 07/07/2026: School Board Work Session

Good afternoon, everyone. We'll call the Tuesday, July 7th, 2026 ASD School Board special work session to order. The time is 5:31 PM. Present in the boardroom are members Jacobs, Lessons, McDonough, and Blakeslee. Present online with us are members Wilson and Bellamy.

I'll note when member Higgins joins us. For our record.

Um, Dr. Bryant and administrative staff have joined us both online and in person as well. We've called ourselves to order and conducted a roll call. We'll move straight to discussion. Our first item for B1 is FY 27-28 operating budget. Administration, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Mr. President. So our CFO Andy Ratliff and team will brief the board on the budget revision proposal that's before the tonight as an action item. The budget revision reflects approximately $11.6 million in new revenue that was recently approved by the legislature. Essentially, the top priority continues to be educator positions, so the proposal adds more than 50 classroom teachers that would be used to address large class size bubbles and provide scheduling relief across all levels. What we'll do is we'll walk the board through the full proposal, and we'll do so again at the regular meeting for the benefit of the general public.

Of note, this proposal also includes a full funding for a grades 6 through 10 ELA curriculum, which is in need of replacement because the current product Springboard is set to be phased out by the vendor. This could be an area in which the board could choose to fully fund the curriculum or instead amend the proposal later tonight to fund the curriculum in phases, and the latter would give room to add additional resources for students such as teacher holdback positions, just as one example. So Our presentation tonight will walk you through potential options for how to proceed. And lastly, the public may have read in the media that ASD could receive additional one-time revenue from the state beyond the $11.6 million that we'll be discussing tonight. Those additional dollars are not in the budget revision tonight because the statute states that the amount of those dollars is contingent on projected surplus oil revenues as determined by the Revenue Commissioner in late August.

This, of course, is not an ideal situation, which is why the board and I promptly sent a letter to the commissioner advocating for more timely information. With that said, I'm afraid that the state does not appear inclined to do so, and for that reason, we need to proceed cautiously and wait on taking action on these funds. And again, it needs to be stated that we do have a looming $40 million structural shortfall for the next fiscal year. That's largely because the FY27 budget budget was partly balanced with a small amount of one-time funds, and healthcare costs, utilities, and wages continue to rise. It's incredibly important that we're mindful that each recurring cost we add, such as a salary, will grow the shortfall, and there are very limited ways to address the shortfall given how deeply the district made reductions this past cycle.

So with all of that said, I'll hand it off to our CFO, Andy Ratliff.

All right, thank you. Um, so I'm gonna go through a few slides quickly. The first set of them, I believe you've seen. We'll talk about some of the money that we've received through HB 263. Uh, that included about $5.5 million for energy relief, and that is included in the memo before you tonight.

Uh, then the $32.1 million in one-time funds, it's contingent upon the actual revenue for FY 26 through the state. Here's the, again, the language in that bill that really says anything above $6.3 billion is going to go to permanent funds for the next $127 million, and then the $115 million after that will go to education. So again, that's, you know, we've heard from the governor, or the, it sounds like from what I hear, the governor's not inclined to follow the letter of this law and just release that on the 31st or shortly thereafter when they determine the revenue.

Then we get to the HB 28, that omnibus bill, and that's where the other $6.1 million comes through, and that's through that required local contribution cap at 4%, which will allow us to collect a little bit more on the additional local side from the city. Again, here's kind of how that, that maps out. The required local contribution would go down by about $6.1 million from where it's at in current law. And then that allows us to, since we've already passed our taxes through the city, allows us to kind of shift that $6 million to the additional discretionary contribution. And then the state pays the additional $6.1 million.

As far as what's in Board Member Memo 6, the recommendations are 50.5 teaching FTE.. In the memo, that's split between elementary specialists and holdback teachers. That's about even, about 50/50 split on that. Really though, this really is going to effectively allow us to put about those, those 50 teachers back into schools kind of where they're needed, just like holdbacks. We used around, I think, I think it was about 23 holdback FTE to shore up the specialist model for this year.

So as we kind of redo the budget and kind of redo those calculations, we're able to put those teachers back and free up those holdbacks, essentially is what it's going to do. So that's going to allow us to push those teachers out into the schools. Alaska Middle College, about $440,000. That is the result of higher enrollment and slightly higher tuition rates. So as kind of tuition rates go up for the general goes public in there, so goes our contract.

I don't think there's a whole lot, but mainly that's just an increase in the number of students that we have participating in that. And per credit hour, it's actually a pretty efficient way to do their education. We do have a number of position corrections in there totaling about $70,000. The 504 coordinator and the Indigenous Ed Specialist that were inadvertently omitted from the budget, and then about $200,000 in salary money from a position at Whaley. What that was is we had cut a position, but when we cut it in our database, we added the funds back as a positive, so it's actually a savings.

So the net result out of all those position corrections is about $70,000. Typically this happens one or two times a year. We do have— we go through our budget like even after we completed it, try to find any errors or omissions, and sometimes we can correct them administratively, sometimes we can't, but we wanted to do this, make it above board, put it in the memo just because we could and get that all settled. The English language arts curriculum, about $2.8 million is needed for the 6 through 10 adoption, as Dr. Bryant said, and we'll go into some other options of how to pay for that and when to pay for it here shortly on the next slide. The activities addenda, that was one where we had, uh, cut all the sports and left some of the activities money in there.

But when we added all the sports back, it ended up being that that activities money was really just, uh, essentially counted on as being sports instead of these other activities like drama or yearbook, things like that. Um, we did put a, a little bit of money in a, a pending negotiations account for kind of unknowns like contractual settlements and For this one in particular, just we didn't know what the addenda were going to be or, you know, how many were changing because we changed the range at some of the high schools through the contract. So I think we can reduce that area now that we've got a better idea of what those contracts are, what those needs are, and how everything's changing to kind of make that one cost neutral. But it is, you know, we do need to add that $460,000 or so for activities, but that's where we can reduce it from without having to take from this $11 million. About $75,000 more will be needed in fuel, just as gas prices are going up, so do our costs.

So try to get that taken care of. School board memberships, which would be AASB, NASB, or the Alaska Association of School Boards, the National Association of School Boards, Coalition for Educational Equity, and the Council of Great City Schools. I'm trying not to use the acronyms there, but that's about $120,000. And then charter schools is $440,000 or so, and I want to talk a little bit about that more in a later slide as well, as well as the attrition amounts. So we'll get to those in a little bit, but it's to kind of better explain what those are and why they're needed.

So for the ELA curriculum options, The recommendation we put before the board funds the entire $2.8 million purchase in FY27. I'm working with the vendor. The other payment options we have are to put $625,000 to it for the current year, which will fund the, some materials, the pilot, the pilot program and some professional development surrounding that, and then pay the balance in FY28 and FY29. We do have to make sure those go into the budget for those years if we're going to go with those other payment options, if there's an amendment or something to this memo to use that money in the current year.

So the attrition offset account, what that is, is you'll see there's two object codes that you'll see in our budget. There's a salaries and a benefits, but this is really used to account for any financial savings that we get from unfilled positions and waived benefits throughout the year. It allows— what we do is we estimate the savings that we think we might get from those funds, and it allows us to budget in other places. It's really like saying, you know, we think we're going to get $100 in revenue. We're going to tell folks they can spend $105, thinking they're not— and kind of taking that chance that they're not going to spend that extra $5.

That's really what this does. And It's to the tune of about $39 million for FY27 at this point. With our— we have— do have some risks in meeting that attrition target. You know, if more people hold on to jobs for longer, we have, you know, if we've reduced a lot of positions, so we have fewer vacancies going into it. If the labor contract's improved enough where we have fewer vacant positions that way, and then just a smaller pool of employees, two-way benefits.

Really are kind of the things that affect this budget or that attrition factor going in our budget. So the $39 million, I think that's about, I want to say, 8% or so of our salaries and benefits in total. So that's, I mean, that's quite a lot of numbers. I mean, it's gone up a whole lot over the last several years as we've had more folks waiving benefits in. Just more vacancies in general.

And then lastly, wanted to briefly kind of touch on the charter schools. So on the required local contribution, their— the charter schools share per statute is about $347,000. That's distributed to all the schools on the basis of the adjusted average daily membership. And that's pretty much standard. That's generally what they've— any one-time fundings that come into this The school district required to be shared with charter schools on that method.

The energy relief was a little bit different though. So that was distributed to school districts based on our proportionate share of audited FY25 energy costs. So that's state objects 435, I believe. So what they do is they take the pool of all school district energy costs, get a percentage of that, and then apply that percentage to whatever pot of money that the legislature approved in the budget. So if we use that same FY25 methodology or energy or the methodology for FY25 for the charter schools, it comes to about $89,000.

And really what it does is it kind of excludes charter schools and lease facilities that have energy costs included in their lease. To that end, you know, the district's energy cost is total. We don't— like for the Ed Center, we don't pay energy costs for that. It's all included in our lease. So that doesn't really count towards the state funding of a SIDA.

So that would affect, I think, 4 charter schools would get that, that money, wouldn't affect everyone.

So that's really the presentation. It's pretty brief, but open it up for questions and conversation.

Member Blakeslee. Yeah, thank you for that. It's, I don't know who to, it's weird to ask questions when you're on the screen because I don't know who to look at. Look at. I'm looking at you, Andy, but you're not here.

I can tell. I'm—. Can you tell that I'm looking at you? Uh, okay, well, I have a lot of questions, so, um, maybe I'll ask a few and then come back to me because I don't want to monopolize time, but I do have a lot of questions. So maybe the first thing that I want to ask is about this curriculum, um, component.

And so I will just say, reading this proposal, there were a lot of surprises in this proposed budget spending plan. Um, again, lots of questions, but the curriculum piece threw me by surprise. It— I feel a little bit blindsided by it because it's a very large dollar amount that I think I'm seeing for the first time. I didn't know anything about, um, and, and is a big chunk of money, especially when we're talking about a spending plan for a dollar size that's almost equivalent to the amount of money that we we're advocating for the public around the levy. And so this is a plan that differs pretty greatly from what we had committed to the public.

We would— how we would spend money, like a very similar amount. So the curriculum itself, my question, what would have been the plan had we not received this windfall of money? If we hadn't— this, this money right here that we're talking about wasn't guaranteed, it wasn't a certainty. So what was the plan about what we were going to do with this curriculum if we hadn't received this funding?

Unfortunately, I don't have a great answer for that question. I did not learn about this, the need for this, until after the budgets were already passed. And, you know, several weeks ago, I think, is probably when we actually learned about it, and then we tried to refine what options we could have. So I don't have a great answer about what that plan would have been otherwise. We probably would have tried to scrape together the $625,000 with prior year money or whatever we could find and bring that back to the board for approval.

Uh, through the president to Member Blakeslee, um, I, I'd like to ask Sean Prince, our senior director of teaching and learning, to come up and talk a little bit about the ELA curriculum, um, just to give a little bit of history because this has been a process of adopting this curriculum due to our current curriculum being discontinued, essentially. So we couldn't continue the normal curriculum, Springboard, that we've been using, and we're forced to go into a new agreement. But there has been an adoption process, and it, it has been pretty extensive. The budget piece has always been the question because we've been in such hard times with our budget over the past few years that this is something that often gets published as a future funding item as opposed to funding it in, in advance, essentially. So I'll let Shawn talk about the details a little bit.

Hi, Member Blakeslee. Just to try to orient you a little bit about this, in 2025, Kirsten had sent an email out to high school principals the cabinet and had a discussion about the fact that, um, College Board had announced their decision to sunset the SpringBoard curriculum, which was something that we had already entered into a long contract with. But this was about halfway into the actual 6-year adoption of that curriculum, so there was an awareness piece of like, we have to make a decision as to what we're going to do, and that it at each budget inter— uh, interval where we talk about our budget in detail, the bids, we will put forward that we have curriculum adoptions that we have to do by state and board statute or policy that says every 6 years we have to review curriculum and decide if we're going to stay with what we have or if we're going to try to go through an adoption process. And what we're doing is we have put this out in our budget for a number of years, but because it's a large ticket item It usually, with our budget shortfalls and all of our concerns, it gets lined itemed out and we basically move it down. And what we're, what we're facing right now is the fact that in these cycles of curriculum adoptions that happen about every 6 years, the ideal plan is that you space them out so that you don't end up having this traffic jam coming to a head.

Which is where we are with our ELA and our math curriculum. And it, it springs up on us in this way where we say we have to do something now. And the plan is, if we can't have the curriculum put in front of us the way that we've written it, then we're going to have to try to create it on our own, which I know is, is a popular idea. Um, I know a number of educators that are very much in favor of this, but again, that's time and money. We don't have time or money.

And if we were to try to say, well, we don't pay for this curriculum, but we're going to have a lot of our talented educators— one, you have to find all the educators that are willing enable to write curriculum in a summer, which is already gone, or during the next school year when they have higher class sizes. And so finding that niche group of educators that would be willing to do that and then pay them for their time is difficult. So there's, there's not a— I, I think what I'm hearing is that a lot of us are looking for a very clean and nice answer There isn't one.

Yes, I hear you on that. Nothing about any of these, any of these scenarios or the deficits that we've been facing is easy. I completely recognize that. Um, but I think so, so going back, it's helpful to hear all that context. I understand that there's been this process, there's been engagement, I assume, with the Curriculum Committee.

I have also heard from many teachers that they're is a strong desire to have the ability to use sort of this moment to have more autonomy and innovation in developing, right, our own curriculum. And I also recognize that that takes time that we don't have. But when we're talking about time, I— that's when I come back to this question of if we didn't have this windfall of money, is that the, the budgetary, the financial plan that was going to happen? That if we had zero, we didn't have $11.6 million to contend with, this was the plan. What was the plan with the curriculum?

Because I'm hearing that it was coming to a head. We have to do something. There's a desire among educators to develop our own. There's not time or money, but now, so what, what was the plan if we had not had this money? What will we have done about the curriculum situation?

So, Shawn, if I could interject, um, so essentially the financial plan would be for us to evaluate this year's current budget to see what we could do without, essentially. Again, if we wanted to continue with the pilot, which would mean cutting things that we haven't already cut, and then potentially reevaluate our FY28 budget to include money in that budget. But that, that's problematic in a timing sense when it comes to curriculum development and, and/or buying, if you will. If we don't purchase curriculum by January of the year before we want to implement it, it will not be here in time for us to train teachers with. And so that's somewhat of the urgency where we're at right now, is that we could piecemeal something together likely for the pilot for this year.

It will mean kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel with our budget and reallocating some funds so we can do that pilot. And then we would still be at, at the budget process in January and February with the board asking for them to fund the next 2 years of, of the curriculum adoption. Um, so with— so, so we can do it, um, that way, although our vendor does not want to cooperate with us that part of it if, if we want to get into splitting the cost of the years. So it gets really complicated quick when you're working with vendors. Ordering, especially coming to Alaska, that large of an order, and then potentially the implications of training for teachers and trying to line that up in an appropriate amount of time so people are trained with the new curriculum.

So it's multi-layered, and there's not really a clean answer other than we would start to look like at, at attrition dollars and carryover funds and things of that nature, which Andy could probably speak to more specifically. But we, we essentially would have to piecemeal it together with our budget. Okay, and I'll— I have a lot of questions, but I want to give my, my colleagues more time to also answer, ask questions. So I'm gonna only ask one more question, and then I'm gonna put myself back in the queue later. But, um, can you just clarify the pilot?

What's the pilot mean? So the first round, um, it's, it's on the screen there listed out in a 3-year process. Um, so the first year, which would be this coming school year, we would select a small amount of teachers to pilot the curriculum, get feedback and provide, you know, substitutions and/or adjustments to the curriculum for the greater district in the following school year. So this year, in the, in the contract that we've arranged with the vendor, they have actually advanced us all of the materials for the pilot program with the anticipation that we would buy that curriculum for FY28 and FY29. And they've done that so that we can get ahead of it and get our pilot started.

And that's just in good faith with us as a district. Um, but the pilot would essentially work with teachers throughout the year along with teaching and learning, um, in a smaller group as opposed to the whole district. And we would be able to adjust and make, um, the adjustments that we need for our district, um, for the following year when we roll it out to every school. Okay, thank you.

Member McDonough. Um, yeah, before my questions, I think I'll ask the president for his thoughts on a sort of loose process. Um, if we're talking curriculum, can we just ask all members to stay on the curriculum item and then maybe— like, so it, it's kind of more of a discussion than a one member at a time. So to other members, just interrupt me if there's questions about curriculum, and then I'll re-enter the queue with a different item.

So the administration is mentioning a new vendor. Can you talk more about— are we— have we made a procurement and done the selection and the vetting and the review? Could— like, there's a lot of infrastructure that gets in play that I know about because I've been in staff, but I think the public and the board doesn't know much about, or especially the new board member. So could you talk to us about the, the way then— well, I actually want to know the story behind Springboard leaving and what did that cost us and why, why are we funding on top of that purchase order, or is there something that is requiring us to continue paying Springboard for a service they're no longer giving us? And then with the story of Springboard leaving, um, could you walk us through the story of a new vendor being vetted and procured?

Sure. So Sean, do you want to walk through the curriculum adoption process? And then I think Jim could speak to the procurement process. Sure. Um, so I'm just going to throw a large number of dates at you and then give you kind of summary of what was happening during those dates.

So in fall of 2025, there was a review of the 6-8 ELA curriculum. There was teacher surveys, classroom visits, data, MAP, and state summative assessments were used to evaluate what was going on because we knew that College Board had sold and sunsetted SpringBoard. So we knew that we still had some resources, but at some point it was going to be a different publishing house that was going to be providing it to us. They weren't going to continue doing Springboard. They were going to shift us to one of their own products.

All right. And then in January, um, we started to look at the ELA curriculum as a leadership team here in-house with the administration. We updated the superintendent in a board memo in January to tell them that we are entering the adoption cycle. Then we started to look at and working with purchasing in February. They also talked about purchasing, reviewing this with IT, making sure that we had what was going on.

In, in March, we had board notification for public viewing of different materials that were out there. By that, we then had an ELA review committee in March as well. Board notification of the materials being viewed. Then we actually had a team come in, review the materials.

Sorry, there's been a lot going on for this, this year. Curriculum review meetings and field tests were done in January and May of this year. We had public viewings in April of the material. We also Then they made the recommendation in May of this year, and we presented that we were going to go with Savis, my perspective, for the 6/8— for 6/10.

So the new vendor selected— can you say it again? Savis. Savis. S-A-V-I-S. It's S-A-V-V-A-S.

Okay, thank you. Um, oh, and then Kirsten, you mentioned there was a procurement question. Sure, Sean mentioned some of it, but Jim works directly with the procurement folks, so he could speak to it. Sure. In this particular case, it was a 3-year agreement.

They fronted a bunch of materials. If the board, um, is unable to or does not choose to let us budget in the next 2 fiscal years for the funds, the $1.8 million, $1.08 million, and then the $1.08 million for year 3, we would have to pay to return all of the curriculum that they've already sent us for this pilot. What's the cost of the pay to return? We, we don't have a cost because We haven't received it yet. We don't know how much their shipping costs are going to be for sure.

And the costs have gone up because of gas prices. So everything that comes on ocean carrier, it's not going to be the same cost today as it would be 8 months from now or 9 months from now. But if we were to freight the volume of these— it's probably, what, 8,000 to 10,000 students worth of curriculum?

Trading that back to the vendor, is that like a $100,000 expense or something higher, lower? Partly what makes it difficult is for hardcover books, anything that's in documentation, if it's been damaged or destroyed or lost, then obviously you just pay for all that outright. So condition matters for the digital piece. It's easy. Mike's guys can say, okay, we don't— we're not going to use the digits.

And then that's a contract negotiation. But the contract we have has not been negotiated to the level of if we choose to return. The contract that was negotiated was a 3-year contract with a pilot of $619,000 the first year, $1.08 million the second, and 1.08, the third. Um, I don't know that we've ever done the negotiations for a contract to assume that we would be unable to complete it. I'm, I'm just asking.

I— and again, I'm— the, the business I've seen and committed to is after June, right? So I don't know, has the board awarded this contract yet? Or are we dealing with commitments on this? I mean, I appreciate the benevolence of this company and the ability to front the materials, but I'm wondering the order of operations and the commitments here with the public's funds. So when Sean's team briefed in, I guess it was April, May, to the board that that was the direction we were moving.

I don't recall the board memo on that, or if it was work session, but the contract follows that. Um, you wouldn't have a contract for something the board wouldn't approve, typically. Um, and you wouldn't go through the 2 or 3 months of negotiations for something that you thought the board would not approve.

Um, is that understandable, or—. Yeah, has the board accepted the curriculum for SAVVAS? Like, is that another matter of business that we've already committed? So that's part of the process that, that Sean outlined. So that's the April-May memo that, uh, Jim spoke to.

So that was the essentially the acceptance of the curriculum as an adoption, and then now we're in the contract phase and the money allocation.

I will hold other questions just on, on the, the other parts of the requested appropriations, so other board members can ask about the curriculum.

Uh, we'll go to Member, uh, Bellamy. Before we do, I want to know for our record, Member Wilson joined us at 6:02 PM. Member Bellamy, the floor is yours. Thank you. Uh, I, I do appreciate, uh catching up the new board members on the ELA curriculum for grades 6 through 10 because they were not a part of the process, which in my opinion was a very thorough process.

Um, I, I— so it's not a surprise to me, uh, that we, that we are, uh, trying to decide how to pay for a curriculum that we know we have need— that we need and that we know that I think the process that was used was a good one for parents, community, and staff. So I don't have a question about that. I kind of want to— I would like, Andy, if you could explain to me, just review again for me the middle college, that amount that you have there. 'Cause we partner with the university. What does that partnership look like and where does this amount fall into that partnership?

Um, sure. Yeah. So we have an agreement with UAA to provide these courses to our students. We got about 75 more students this year than we had projected for next year that we had prior to that. Um, so we do get some discount on Things like we don't pay all the fees that are associated with it.

So we do get a discount on some, on some of the things, but it's really we're paying per credit hour for the kids that are taking those courses. But it is just an escalation based on the number of kids and kind of their tuition increases. I think the total price tag for that contract with UAA is about $2 million per year. And of that $2 million, we're paying— if the 2— so this $476,000, uh, $437,000 is in addition to the $2 million or part of it? Um, that gets it up to about $2 million, I think.

Okay, and that covers another 70— at least includes an increase in the enrollment in that program? Yeah. Okay, all right. Uh, thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll let other board members— I'll put myself back in the queue and wait to come around.

Member Lessoms. Um, thanks. This is, uh, sort of focused on curriculum. I think, um, Member McDonough, for that suggestion to keep us organized. Um, when I received the memo, I was reminded that we had received maybe at least a handful of indications through the weekly Board Connect messages that we, we received.

There was a pretty robust one on June 12th outlining the process that the administration and community went through to get to this point. And I know that Dr. Bryant, in, in his relaying information to us, has indicated for some time that this is a pressing need. So I guess I personally wasn't surprised So, but, but I guess that, you know, the scale of the cost certainly is a larger number than, say, we adopted a new algebra geometry Algebra 2 curriculum not long ago, and it's a little— this is more expensive, maybe, maybe twice as much, but maybe we're also impacting all students in grades 6 through 10 as opposed to a narrower group of students taking algebra geometry and Algebra 2.

It's really important that our students have curricular materials. I think it's exceedingly helpful to hear that we can divide potentially this purchase into 1, 2, or even 3 budget cycles. That's actually more generous than I had anticipated. I had sort of asked about that question right after we received this memo and got an update um, earlier today on that, the $625,000 figure. And I think it informed the amendment that I drafted that I'll introduce at the meeting later this evening.

But theoretically, we could leverage available dollars right now for the pilot project only. Which gets materials into educators' hands and student hands. And I see that Jim Anderson would like to interject something, so I'll, I'll yield. So I, I did say, and it is true, that as long as the board approved next year's budget and it left the $1.08 million in, the risk of multi-year commitments in a contract is that board members leave for lots of reasons, and a new board may not feel as obligated toward a contract that was signed 2 or 3 years earlier because they weren't on the board then. So there, there is risk in doing it.

I just want to make sure that's, that's understood. So if we talk about this in a year, we, we can refresh the conversation. Um, thank you for that. Well, my intention later this evening would be to introduce an amendment that essentially bifurcates the, that $2.7 figure into an immediate pilot project amount. And then based on my understanding of House Bill 263, and we saw a slide earlier, and I'm going to look for confirmation from the administrative team, my understanding is that House Bill 263, which says that after, you know, if the state hits its targets after PFDs and energy checks are cut, then districts will receive remaining dollars according to their ADMs.

And what I don't see is that it's an all or nothing, right? I don't see that if we don't hit the target, we simply will get nothing. What I— my understanding is that there would be, you know, if we hit a lower level than the state's target, as long as PFDs and energy checks get made, we could get, I don't know, $10 million or $27 million. I'm making numbers up. My point is that it, it seems reasonable to assume that some amount of, of revenue will be coming to the district at some point this fall, and my inclination would be to recommend at this time that we move forward with the pilot project so that our educators are able to implement and evaluate this program and intend to come back to the remaining dollar amount in this fiscal year with this board sometime in the fall.

So that's my, my hope that we could get to that point. And in the meantime, if we subtract $600,000 sorry, $25,000 or so from that $2.7 million, we can actually then leverage the remaining $2.1 in other immediate ways this evening that would be aligned with conversations the board has already had about the importance of teachers, perhaps about the importance of nurses, perhaps about the importance of other priorities this board has already identified. So, um, those are my thoughts on this curricular materials. So I'll pause there.

Member Wilson.

So actually, I'm going to piggyback on Member Bellamy, and I just wanted some more information on Alaska Middle College, which I— you don't have to provide tonight. Um, I am curious to know how many students participate in Alaska Middle College, how many of them are full-time, how many of them are part-time. As my understanding is, students do not have to be full-time participating in that program, correct? That's correct. Okay.

Um, and then, uh, percentage of students that graduate, which I, I would assume was very high. Um, but I, I would like that information again in Board Connect would be great. Sure, Member Bellamy, we can add that to Board Connect. Um, there is an enrollment into AMCS as the school of record, but just for anecdotal information right now, some of those students take high school level courses at King Tech and then part-time classes at UAA, but they're still considered a full-time ANCS student, just for awareness. But we'll get the numbers.

Uh, Member McDonough. Yeah, just quickly on the curriculum question again.

I, I've been looking back through the April, May, and also just for thoroughness, March agendas, and I don't I don't see the memorandum where the board has accepted SAVA, so could I have administration find that and let us know the number when it comes up during the regular meeting? It might, it might take the admin— I mean, it doesn't need to be now, but it could just be something I'd like to be able to cite later tonight.

That's my only question on curriculum. Member Lessels. I would thank you for raising that. My recollection is we have not formally adopted the curriculum. What I believe has happened is that the administration has identified the curriculum they would like the board to adopt, and that moving forward tonight would essentially be the adoption of that curriculum.

If that is true, I would, I would have a lot of issues with the lack of public process. That is definitely not anybody's fault, but I would find a really hard time funding and accepting— the word accepting— the curriculum during a special meeting in the summer. Lots of people have other commitments. Um, that definitely feels like predictable, foreseeable, regular business, and I would encourage my colleagues to consider with care the public process required for us to be able to affirm knowledge contained within a curriculum and to really obtain the input and insight that's required to make that decision. So if it's just adding money to a budget line, I think there could be an argument made to skip public process.

But I actually have an agenda amendment I'll ask the board to consider. But even then, I would want to see an actual curriculum accepting business item on a regular matter of business that we can use the full infrastructure of the district's public outreach to engage in. Not just the, the administrative vetting of the curriculum to give feedback to the teachers, but the board also needs our own public commentary on, on the knowledge curriculum that we are adopting.

Member Lessons and Member Blakeslee. I guess this is a question for board members as well as administrators.

Um, would supporting an investment in pilot materials this evening be a fundamentally different action than a full adoption of materials, which could conceivably take place in the fall at a regular board meeting with a multi-week cycle?

There's some non-action to action. I mean, is— would approving the purchase of pilot materials be a curricular adoption, or would it just be the purchase of pilot materials?

I guess that's essentially a question that the board would need to wrestle with, honestly. Um, if you want to allocate the funds for the pilot but not adopt the curriculum, then we would likely need to put that, um, in the board memo stating that. The trouble we have with, with things is if we end up not adopting the curriculum down the road, we have essentially signed a 3-year contract at that point to adopt— or not to adopt, but to pay for all of those materials over time. So it really comes down to a contract issue with the vendor at that point, and that's, that's a whole separate thing from adopting the curriculum.

Mr. President, could I— I'm not sure whose turn it was. I'm sorry with the order. So was it still my turn? No, we're moving from Member Lessis to Member Blakeslee. Okay.

Um, I also just want to really quickly gauge with the board, are we committing to staying on topic, on one topic at a time right now still? Are we—. That's your choice as a member. Well, I want to respect everybody. I want to respect the body's sort of decision.

I respect each of you, and so I will not dictate what questions you ask. Um, but you can choose to do that if you'd like. Okay, well, um, I, I have other questions, but then I've heard questions not related to curriculum, so I have other questions not related to curriculum. I don't want to ask them though if we're still staying on topic of curriculum. So in the vein of curriculum, I think just to respond to Member Lessens I think that the adoption— it, like, fundamentally, I think that the adoption of pilot materials isn't the adoption of curriculum, but it is obviously a financial obligation that we're committing to related to curriculum.

So technically, it might not be adoption of curriculum, but it's very much something that influences curriculum decisions. So I think it's like a technicality and a financial consideration. But I have other questions not related to curriculum, but I'm not going to ask them so we can stay on the curriculum topic.

We'll go to Member Higgins. Yeah, I'm, I'm totally confused and surprised. I mean, there was a budget process in which we're allocating funds in pots with anticipation we might be spending it. That's not approving a contract. That there was a purchasing policies that talk about how you go about what the board has to approve purchasing contracts of a certain amount and the type.

So I'm, I'm in it, and then we're just adjusting the budget to provide additional funds, and it sounds like you want us to approve a contract that hasn't come forward to— it's very confusing to me. Uh, the curriculum is one approval process, the, the budget is another, and then the contract is the third thing. Those are three separate items. And somehow putting it together and saying, if we put it in the budget, you've approved it. You put money in the budget for all kinds of contracts.

That doesn't mean we've approved every contract that you might come out with. You put money in there for labor contracts. You put money in there for transportation. You put money in there for a lot of things. But when the— when there's approval process and a selection process, the board gets engaged in it and we approve that.

It still comes to the board, but it sounds like right now it's being thrown in to say you approve— if we approve this in the budget, we've approved the contract. And we haven't seen the contract. We haven't seen— I just don't see where this makes— this complies with purchasing policy. I don't see where it complies with just sharing everything and laying it out and then doing that, but a budget process is not approval for a contract, and this is very confusing. Yeah, so you're correct, Member Higgins, that allocating the money is not approval of the contract.

We would still come back and have the contract approved by the budget— or by the board— if you approve the budget for it. Um, but the, the company is not willing to do a 1-year contract with us. The, the company is willing to do a 3-year contract with And, and so that's where it gets complicated. We would be able to do, as Member Lessen suggested, multiple payments over time, but we would have to fulfill that within our 3 years of the contract if approved.

Member McDonough.

I think just in the interest of time, I'll move past where I was going to go with the curriculum questions.

So can I ask on— I think the next thing I was most interested in was the Alaska Middle College school, and especially for later tonight, I would like to know what is the cost per student of the school. Um, pre and post this increase? And also, what is the cost per student of the comprehensive Big 8 high schools? So I could see the— basically the ratio of impact that, that we're being asked to, um— to me it looks like a subsidy, and I just want to make sure that that tracks.

So I'm just looking for cost per student. Even— I know that number is very hard to even pin down because there's a lot of different things we would figure as costs, but just total cost of AMCS divided by the total number of full-time equivalent student credits earned or something. I'm not even sure how it would be figured, but I would like to know how, how we're approaching this as an equitable measure and distribution of funds that, um, to me, the AMCS coming and saying we need this money is important, but we've also been approached by virtually every other Big 8 high school saying we also need these funds. And I want to see how does it actually compare in an equitable ratio of distribution.

Go to Member Blakeslee, unless Dr. Trumbull Johnson, you have a response. I was just going to say I don't have that number off the top of my head, but we can see what we can come up with before the regular meeting, um, unless Andy, you have information.

No, I think we're going to be hard-pressed to come up with that number at the meeting. There's just so much that goes into the comprehensive high schools. You have to look at maintenance, all the kind of the special education, ELL, gifted, all these things that are funded from different sources, that the resources are pushed out into those schools. Um, I don't think I would be able to get you an accurate comparison that would let you make, um, an informed decision by tonight.

Thank you. Um, just to restate what I stated earlier, Um, to the, to my mem— to my colleagues. Um, I think that's, that is another reason I'm asking for an agenda modification here in a couple minutes, is I think there's enough of these decisions that are going to take some time for us to process the logic that, um, it will be healthy for us to pull some of the items into a different meeting's agenda.

Member Blakeslee. I have a question on a different topic as we, uh, converse about topics of complexity. So the first bullet here on classroom teachers, that $6.8 million, the language here reads that it would provide 50.5 FTE for classroom teachers to adjust the metric for elementary special specialist teachers to provide planning time for elementary teachers. So I was hoping for some clarity about what that specifically means, and I— and just— and maybe just correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that I interpret that is that because we have cut so deep, um, in the, the FTE cuts for schools including elementary that perhaps, um, the specialists that we do not have anymore now prevent some of those elementary teachers from having the planning time that they need. And I, I guess I'm wondering if that's what this means, that these are hiring of specialist teachers to ensure, like what it says, that some of those teachers get planning time.

And if that is the case, if I'm reading this correctly, does that mean that some schools would end up having both an art and a music teacher year-round while other schools would not, or what, how, what does that look like in practice? So sort of, um, so this, this budget item would essentially return the holdbacks to our, our pool of holdbacks that we have typically at the beginning of the year to address class size bubbles that come up, or combination classrooms, or things of that nature. What we did in the spring is when we redid the specialist model, we used holdbacks to essentially patch the budget together so it would work. What we're asking for is the, the board to address putting those holdbacks back into the account, essentially, so that when we get to August and we have you know, 40 kids in a classroom, we're able to give a teacher to that particular school to bring class sizes down because maybe a lot of people moved to that school over the summer. So essentially, when we did the specialist schedule in the spring, it's a new system and there was a lot happening all at once as a part of that budget process.

And once we were able to vet how it all worked better, we realized that our metric was off. So about half of the teacher FTE that you see here would be new holdbacks that the board would allocate, and about half of it would be to return the, the holdbacks that were used to patch that budget together for specialists to go back so we could address class size issues this fall. And so, and just for extra layman's terms for myself, does that mean that some schools, some elementary schools, would end up with both an art and a music teacher year-round versus that semester model? It would not. We would still be in the semester system.

Okay, and so what then would that look like when you're adding back holdbacks to restore the specialists? Like, what specialists would you be hiring? So the holdbacks would actually go to a classroom teacher. So it would be like a regular 4th grade teacher if we had too many 4th grade students at a, at a site. And what we've done in the specialist schedule when we planned was we overstaffed somewhat the specialist model so that we could account for those adjustments in the fall, so that when we hire a classroom teacher, we don't have to hire another specialist teacher on top of that.

And we already have that in the system. We have enough wiggle room built in that we don't have to adjust the specialists, and we can just adjust the classes at, at the school. Now, if we get a windfall somehow, some way, that would not be the case. But for those minor adjustments that we need to make, we've, we've built that into our specialist model for the year.

Okay, and so this is all in the form— well, this is directly targeted to elementary, the entirety of this, or just that half of it that's for the elementary specialists and the other half is holdbacks for secondary or elementary or whoever needs it most? So essentially all 50.5 FTE could be allocated where there's need, K through 12. Essentially what is happening is we've already used up the previous holdbacks that were already budgeted on specialists. So this would return that holdback to the account that we hold our specialists in, and then we'd be able to use them for those class sizes. So essentially we were able to get across the finish line with our budget with that patch of using holdbacks for our elementary specialists, and now we're asking for that to go back into holdbacks with this additional budget allocation.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, that gets us right to 6:30. Um, follow-up question, is that possible? Uh, quickly, yeah. Can the administration talk about the process for allocating holdbacks? We have more than 50 elementary schools.

For example, there will be more than 50 elementary school bubbles, but you also have kids who need meet graduation requirements, um, across that— I mean, so you have kids across the K-12 spectrum. How do you allocate 50 FTE when there's significantly more need? Yeah, it's a great question. It's super complicated and, and a layered process. Um, essentially, to start out with, we look at what our enrollment numbers look like at each school, if they've met projections that were allocated, um, as a part of their PTR in the spring.

So if a school essentially was allocated a certain amount based on what they anticipated having for enrollment and they haven't gone over, then that is, that's a consideration in our process. If they're over-enrolled based on those projections, then we start to look at how are they over the PTR in terms of enough students have enrolled to allocate another teacher, which is It varies every year on the PTR. So this year, depending on the grade level, will depend on how many kids we're looking at that are over. So the elementary process and the secondary process vary quite honestly. Elementary is a little more straightforward because for about every 32 students, you're allocated another teacher at the elementary level for, for a classroom teacher.

At the secondary level, it gets a little bit more complicated because it's by subject. Project. And so you really have to look at your whole master schedule with the principal and say, you know, we have too many kids in this particular English class during this period, we need another one. And the principal may say we need, you know, 3 sections of English and 2 sections of math, and then we try to work on those things. So at the secondary level, it's not necessarily a 1-teacher allocation all the time.

Sometimes it's a half-time teacher, sometimes it's asking a teacher to to teach one additional class during their planning time, and, and it's a much more layered process at secondary because of the content level and expertise there. So, but we work really closely with our principals, and, and we track enrollment regularly from the end of July all the way through September because we typically get students all the way through the end of September that are still coming back to start school. And so it's a really long process, a lot of communication between principal supervisors, myself, the principals on the ground, and demographics definitely play a part of that in the beginning of it in the spring and early summer. And we always check back to say we allocated this amount of teachers based on this many students, but here's where they sit. The other process that we do look like we do look at is rather than just always giving a teacher, we also look at schools that are under-enrolled and then potentially make teacher moves if needed prior to the school year starting so that we're using our resources really effectively.

Okay, um, thank you for the explanation. Thank you, administration, for the presentation. Really good discussion, and I think a wise use of a work session. We are going to adjourn our work session at 6:33 PM and then take a 10-minute recess and begin our regular meeting.