Anchorage School Board: 8/26 ASD School Board Ad-Hoc Committee Meeting

Can you guys hear us online? Yep. Yep. Great, great. Well, I'll call the meeting to order.

It's 8:26, 12:01 PM. Welcome everyone to the first ad hoc committee in many years. This committee will be spending the year looking at agency rightsizing. I'll start with the roll call. I'll just do myself.

I'm the chair, Paul McDonough. And I'll start here to my left in the room, and we can just call ourselves out for the record. Sure. Kirsten Johnson-Strumpflehrer, Deputy Chief of Schools. Andy Ratliff, CFO.

Jared Bryant, Superintendent. Jim Anderson, COO. MJ, Chief of Staff. Mary Kasulkin, Executive Assistant. And then— oh yeah, Tim Rocky.

Thank you. Sorry, I was cutting you off. Um, and then in the online, um, if I could ask our host controller to promote Janice Park, Assemblymember Janice Park, to a panelist. Um, and then online we have Rachel Blakeslee, school board member, and Margot Bellamy, school board member, with Mike Fleckenstein, uh, chief information officer, and Carl Jacobs, president of the school board. And then when promoted, we will be also seeing and being able to speak with Assemblymember Janice Park, who is liaison on the committee.

I believe that is the whole roll call. Thank you everyone for joining us.

So I just want to get us started on the agenda here.

A point of Information on like the flow of this, um, you know, there's a lot of staff here. We have Tim Rocky from the newspaper, and we're joined by assembly member, um, who, uh, like, I want this to be a dialogue-based committee as much as possible, so feel free to interrupt or chime in or ask questions. Um, and especially in the online, I'm looking at a Zoom, but it's still kind of hard to notice hands raised. So we're inviting a little bit more loose control over the rules. If you have a question, it's a good time to speak up.

But first on the agenda is the debrief from ASC Rightsizing for the last about 5 years. Of this effort. So I'll turn it to the superintendent and his team to start the debrief. Sure, thank you, Mr. Chair.

So, uh, Jim Anderson has a PowerPoint ready to walk us through at a very high level the work that's happened over the past several years of BrightSizing. So, Mr. Anderson, okay, go to this.

Okay, so real quick, I want to, uh, I put about 13, 14 slides together. I know I have about 10 minutes to go through this, but obviously, um, if you want me to camp out on something or you have questions, this is really designed to give you an overview of what we've done over the last 5 years, how we did it, what our processes were, um, for those who weren't intimately involved with it. The starting point, and this goes back over a decade, is that the city's birth rate, enrollment, and school-age population have continued to decline for well more than a decade. You know, it's really a national trend that we're seeing everywhere that younger kids are having less babies. And it's been happening for a while.

And there's a number of factors, you know, from the economy through expensive housing, all kinds of things that, that have done that. It does look like the birth rate in Anchorage is starting to level out.

But it's still much, much smaller than it was just a few years ago. So here's a quick discussion slide on the timeline. In 2022, we started that fall and we had about 8 or 9, in fact, almost every single work session starting in September and even the end of August. All the way up through December was talking right-sizing.

We started with, at that point in time, since 2013, we had lost about 5,000 students and we really had only closed 2 schools and both of them were on base. So we picked 6 schools. We went through again all of the metrics and I'll show you some of them in a bit. On evaluating. And then we held a town hall at each of the potentially closing schools.

At the end of December, December 19th, actually, the board voted to close Abbott Loop, and the other 5 schools remained open. In 2023, we took a year off of right-sizing. Um, but then what we did was start in the spring of the year prior in 2024, we started in April and briefed through the summer and all fall, and we had a number of large-scale briefings. We changed from the town hall format where in 2022 I would give a brief, a few others would talk, and then we would have open mic night. There was one microphone, people would line up behind it, and they would get 3 minutes to talk.

Kind of like a school board meeting. And then after it was all over, we try to answer their questions one person in the room at a time, but it really was kind of impersonal. And then after that type of format, we realized what we needed was to engage more with the community. So we went to community conversations, and I know Margo was at many of those. I don't know about the two newest board members, But we had places set out in multiple areas across buildings where they could talk to the transportation person or the instructional or busing or all these different groups.

And so really, we, we still had an opening brief, um, but it was a lot of interaction with the community, and we, we felt like that was probably the way to go, and it worked out great. We did still also do an online version for those who couldn't attend any of those events. And then in December of 2024, or November, I'm sorry.

No, it was December. Nunaka Valley and Lake Hood, out of the 7 schools that we had recommend, were selected for repurposing. Both of those went to charter schools. Dream at Nunaka Valley Lake Hood got Alaska Native Cultural Charter School. Then we started in 2025 that fall, and we were told the previous December that we needed to have at least 2 schools, um, and we put Lake Otis and Fire Lake back up as recommended closures.

We, as a timeline, we asked for the board to make a decision in November because it helped us prep better for the budget season. They kept both of those schools open, and we'll talk about that, I'm sure, and have talked about it many times. And then in following February, the board came back and said, you know, we need to capture more money. The deficit is too large. Many of the cuts that you proposed are not palatable to the community.

And they told us on a Monday night to announce new school closures, at least 2, by that Friday. So ultimately the board closed Fire Lake, Lake Otis, and Campbell, and I think everyone's tracking that. So the first thing I wanna start with is, and I think this is misunderstood by a lot of people across the city, we all know that everyone in Anchorage does not watch school board meetings. Back in 2022, although we started right-sizing as part of the budget process, we did really engage with the community and the board on, on the reality is that it wasn't just about money, it was about the levels or education levels of service in the efficiencies within the district. And so we talked about all of the challenges at small schools from combo classes through specialists that were having to go to numerous different schools because the schools were so small they didn't have enough students to get a full-time FTE.

So the, the less combo classes we could have and the more we could put closer to a full-time teacher at an elementary school, that was really our goal. And, and so from the beginning all the way up through this last year We have focused on education levels of service. Secondary also has challenges. I think all of you are, are well aware of those, um, from sports and activities to course offerings and all of those things. As schools keep getting smaller and smaller, if you can combine schools, you can create efficiencies and increase those levels of service.

So I did want— okay, we also had the repurposing candidates. And on the top half of this slide, you can see that we really did look for adjacent pairs of schools that had low utilization. We looked at the staffing levels, and then you can look at the criteria that, that we really looked at at each school over time, and we put them in groupings, which you can see on the next slide. And, and this is what is difficult to articulate. When we look at schools to consolidate, we're not looking at trying to consolidate schools that are a long ways apart, like Chugiak Elementary School with Alpenglow are not two schools you would want to look at for consolidating because there's no efficiency.

You can't even get the kids to, to their new school within the 45-minute mandatory window for busing. As long as you have three-tier busing. Well, this is a snapshot of just Northeast Anchorage, and I think most of you know many of these are Title I schools. Our older schools that were built back in the '50s, '60s, '70s even, really were built to be neighborhood walking schools. So they're really close together.

Those are 2-mile circles. So you can see that When you look at these groupings of a lot of different schools that are really close together, it's not going to result in significant amounts of busing. But what you are going to get is combining those schools. Like when we closed Nunaka Valley and moved them to Baxter, all of a sudden Baxter went from 50% capacity all the way up to now it's, it's nearly full as a result of changes between closing Nunaka Valley and adding in some other programs and increasing other things. So this is, this is where that first year, and it really has continued, was very difficult because where do we find most of the schools that are really, really close together?

Title I schools. You don't find it in South Anchorage. You certainly—. Consolidating Girdwood would be problematic at many levels. And so we went through a lot of open public discussions about what is the right school to close.

And I can tell you that no matter how many metrics you have, no matter what rubric you use, the one thing that we know for certain is that we have seen where we closed Abbott Loop or Nunaka or Lake Hood or Lake Otis, we'll see the same thing for sure. As you consolidate and you have more students at a school, it's difficult to say that that was the one school out of these four that, that was the school to close. Because what you're really looking for is for the remaining two or three schools to have more students in them so you have the better education levels of service. And oftentimes within that grouping, it's very difficult to say of these three, this one absolutely. Now, you know, if it has a large amount of deferred maintenance, you know, if It has earthquake damage, all of these kind of things that we know about.

And then it comes down to things like busing, because sometimes there's a major road in between one school and another where now you're going to have a significant increase in busing. But it is, it is a lot of effort behind the scenes to come up with recommendations for closing. And so this is what we came up with in the fall of '22. That was fiscal year '23 for us, and, and you can see that on the receiving school list for Abbott Loop, Kassoon did grow after that. Trailside really didn't get very many students, but Kassoon grew.

We even tracked those students identified by student ID into the next year, and what Chris Opitz found during the standardized testing and the other student outcomes was that they did not decrease in their, their student outcomes. In fact, they increased in several areas. So the education levels of service really is something that you're looking for when you look at consolidating. There is, there is a money piece on the first year or two, that's true. By year 5, it's really probably not about the money at all.

But what you don't have on year 5 is that same principal, custodian, nurse, librarian still competing for fewer dollars. So even though your revenue, you don't have a gain in revenue, you have those core staffs at those schools that are no longer competing against every other school and the same amount of money.

So there is a measure of financial gain especially in an era where we have less money nearly every year.

So I wanted to walk through real quick and just show what we did in fiscal year '25. And that was the year that we really started briefing the board in April with a decision in December. We had multiple surveys. We had surveys the first time. We had multiple community events.

And this was a pretty long, engaged process. And I know that at some point Paul's going to want to talk about timeline in this committee and what does a good timeline look like after we've established criteria and all those other things. And I think this one was very long and very demanding. And the reality is that until you know your enrollment the following fall, When you start doing things the spring prior, it's good for setting the stage, but until you know the enrollment at every school in the fall, it's tough to actually get to where you're narrowing down the list because we do have schools that lose more than others every year. But I think that was certainly our best effort at trying to close and consolidate schools and And these are just some of the briefings.

So we laid out everything, the metrics and rubrics, and we asked the board to approve the metrics and rubrics. And it was kind of a semi-approval because it was a work session, but everyone understood what we were looking at before we started, you know, actually providing a list. So you'll see these are some of the metrics that we use. If you look at, you know, school size, if you have a really, really small school, it's one, probably a Title I school, it's probably pretty old, and it probably has other schools very close by. And then you, as you work your way over on the levels of service, you can see that At the end of the day, the combo classrooms, uh, at that point in time before we increased PTR by 4, uh, really that was something that, that we saw.

We saw it at Baxter when Nunaka Valley went to Baxter. If you look at Tudor Elementary today and you go talk to that principal, she'll tell you that, uh, when we pushed all those kids into that school Her combo classrooms went down as expected, um, and, and at Denali it helped them because they got the Montessori kids over there. And it really did have, at the end of the day, some positive outcomes despite the anguish within the community at seeing their program or their school being on a list. So also that year, this was the first time where Unlike fiscal year '22 or 2022 and 2023, that we really looked at what else can we do with a building besides just close and consolidate. And if you look at the repurpose at the top, we really did intentionally move charter schools into schools that were closing because they were paying leases.

Roca Shula's last year was going to go up to $1 million a year or just under. And so trying to help a charter school put the resources they have into their students as opposed to annual increases in leases. And you'll see that with Stream and Eagle, and, um, and that discussion will come up many times, I'm sure, in the future. But the one big thing we added that Jared and I had been talking about since he first became a superintendent was trying to put child care in programs because we are a child care desert. And so we made child care front and center in many, many public discussions that we wanted to embed it into our schools.

And if you go over to Fairview Elementary, um, you'll see the first big success that we've had this year. Um, Kidscore International Head Start moved into Fairview Elementary School. We had to do some modifications last year, and not only is it good for the community because Head Start at Fairview is in a pretty low economic area. But as part of the lease, we also guaranteed a classroom just for ASD personnel students or kids. So we're going to have a classroom of 17 dedicated only to ASD families that need childcare.

And it's, it's really, it's, it's really to to keep lower-paid employees, or hourly especially, and to attract them, to hire them. And so I'm pretty excited that it took us a couple years to get there from the time we first started with a concept. And you're going to see the childcare embedded in our schools. I already have other people I'm having multiple discussions with. It's only going to increase.

And then obviously there's all those other things like getting charter schools out of their leases and closing or demoing schools. Those are always things we look at as part of the evaluation rubric.

So this was FY— the first year's—. Whoops. No. Yes, this was the first year.

Oh, I got these backwards when I pulled them in here.

This—. Yeah, Wonder Park was on it. So that was our first year list in Bear Valley, and that's when we closed Abbott Loop. What I did want to show though was there was last year— there's certainly continuing discussion about what happened last February. In November, the board voted to keep Fire Lake and its partner school both opened.

In December, as part of Andy's balancing act, just like multiple other surveys we had done, um, we saw the numbers and it was pretty high that 71% of the community supported closing and combining schools. What we also see though, and we've seen it during community conversations, town halls, other surveys is people do recognize that a better education level of service is important. They understand that we didn't have the money to keep doing everything the way we had always done it. But in every single case, as soon as you pick a school, they certainly believe that's the wrong school and that any other school but their school is probably the better school. And it's— they've said publicly, email, everything else, And so we know that's a reality, and we're actually pretty proud that people—.

These— our schools are important to them. They're important to the communities, and they all want their school to stay the same or grow.

But we do have a pretty good base of community support to combine and consolidate schools.

And I left out. I thought I pulled it in. I'm missing a slide, um, but those were the main things I was hoping to get through in 10 minutes, and I took 13. Sorry. So, well worth the 13 minutes.

Um, any questions from committee members first? Also, for the record, we're now joined by President Jacobs in the room, and, um, We did iron out some of the tech problems getting Assemblymember Park on. She joined via phone on 12/20. So, Janice, can you hear us?

I don't know. I think we might have to manually request your unmuting. Just—. Okay.

We're doing a quick sound check. Janice, if you— yeah, go ahead. Are you there? Okay. I think I'm on now.

Oh, great. Yeah, thank you. And thank you to the IT team in the back way over there for getting us set up. Any questions from committee members on that debrief report? Yeah, President Jacobs.

Good. Can I ask administration to answer a question? I mean, essentially, I'm trying to ascertain if there's any link between housing density and where Title schools exist. And I, I don't— I haven't done a count, but I anticipate that there's a larger number of, say, uh, bigger scale apartment complexes in East Anchorage where we have a tighter cluster of schools, um, versus, say, like the Bear Valley area or, um, Eagle River Elementary. I don't know that to be true, but is housing— does housing density play a role and how close schools are together and therefore where it might make sense to consolidate?

It certainly did. If you look at the smaller, older homes that were walking neighborhood schools, you'll see smaller schools with less land, more compacted. Whereas if you go to Hillside or Southside or Chugiak, where schools are— or houses have more land, they're farther apart, the schools are farther apart. Um, but at that point we already had busing, um, going through the district and it started increasing. So there are some 3 new apartment complexes in the last couple years were built in Eagle River that I, that I'm aware of.

There certainly are more apartments along that Muldoon Corridor than you see south side. And I'm, I'm not highlighting that just to, to talk about What was chosen in the past, I'm trying to highlight that as something that the district is going to have to navigate in the future, is that housing density is a factor in how many buildings are located where they are, I think, and then how efficient it might be to consolidate. It's just a factor, and it's not a choice that we make, which is maybe where Ms. Park would have some feedback that she could take back. So we do look at is the density of students in any geographic area.

Whether it's housing or apartments or anything else, it is more challenging, especially some of the apartment complexes on the Muldoon corridor where we have a lot of CIT students and they move in and out. And so if you look at a population of enrollment in September, it might look much different in December or January.

And it just, It just happens, and, but it's not so much that they weren't replaced by another family with some kids, right? So we don't really look at housing density. What the committee will ultimately see when we bring Shannon Bingham in, he pulls up, he's got a pretty massive database that we don't have, and it populates where every student in the district lives. And he can separate those students. He can look at whether they're low economic status, whether they're ELL, whether they're all of those different categories.

And so as we're looking at groupings of schools, we can see the types of students within those groupings. We can also see where they're more densely compacted. So if they were more densely compacted on the west side of a group of 3, then you're probably going to look at the gaining school being on the west side. So you, you might not have to provide as much busing to move all of them to one of the other gaining schools. So we look at a lot of different— we look at data a lot of different ways.

I built lots of dashboards last year where I could quickly filter through and look at all of the different factors for the students. We also have Courtney and Heather from Transportation pulling up their system. And as we're looking at what looks like on the ground the best school to be a gaining school or a closing school, they're looking at it to figure out based off major road networks or how long it would take buses to get there, whether it's even supportable. So it's really a pretty massive effort to say This is why we picked this one school because transportation matters. If you can reduce the number of buses, then that's a win for the district in every given way.

But if you're gonna have to double the number of buses within a cluster of 3, then obviously you need to look at a different school or enlarge the cluster. So it's more complicated than density of students.

And when Shannon pulls it up, not only can you see the students, but he can color code them all to find out whether they even go to the school that they live in. So if you look at Anchorage proper, the average rate is about 30% of students across the board don't go to their neighborhood school. Some schools it's even higher than that. Eagle River, 33 to 37% of students don't go to their boundary school, they go to somewhere else. So as we over decades built and embraced school choice, the fact that a bunch of kids live there, if none of them— like, uh, Nanaka Valley is a great example.

Almost 40% of the kids that would have gone to Nanaka Valley went somewhere else. And so families even came to the town halls or community convenings and even talked about— they finally realized, I told my kids to go to, you know, the school I thought was best for them. And they realized by doing that, along with all their other neighbors that did that, they now had a really low utilization rate for schools. So we look at all of those different factors and we can see them really quickly with the assistance of automation and all the datasets we have.

I don't know if that was—. Yeah, I see a hand up from committee member Blake Slee.

You will have to unmute, so.

Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, great. I know there's a lot more on this agenda, so just a really quick question. Appreciate the presentation, but one thing that I think I have noticed is I hear a lot about survey results that say— and also, mind you, have heard the same thing in public from many people as well, I myself have said the same thing— people that support school closures, and then you see the response of people getting upset when it's their own school, which is a very understandable response.

But the thing that I find that seems like it's missing in the survey data or even in the public conversation is an understanding of why, or the, the motivation or the rationale that people have behind why they are supportive of school closures. And what I have found is that many seem to believe that school closures are the thing that will solve these massive budget deficits that we've faced year after year. It is the idea that if ASD would just close some more schools, we'd be done with it, this conversation of the deficit. And, and I wonder, I guess my— if I phrase that in a question, is, is if any of the survey data itself has, has made it clear what, like, what financial savings, however minimal they are, are actually included in every school closure. I know I've seen data that shows every school closure is like $900,000 saved, whatever.

That's, that's not net savings, right? It doesn't account for any additional expenses you might have with transportation or what other, other outcomes come with moving students. But if that's— or if people are understanding through those surveys that they are receiving what, what school closures actually do for the benefit of kids And I— and if they don't right now in those surveys, um, and maybe then the question is, can we include that? Or maybe that's just part of this right-sizing committee, is, is better education about what school closures actually mean and what the benefits are. And I think there's just this heavy focus that school closures mean closing the deficit, and that is not what it means.

So, um, remember, Blasey, I agree, and I think that's something that we should capture, something we should look more deeply into, the motivations and factors. But what I will say is I've also met people that share your perspective, that they feel that school closures are the panacea for major financial issues. But I was also interested by the many comments I saw in the post-bond survey where people in the open responses were very forthright that it's less about the school closures generating a huge influx of revenue It makes them question the value of their investment when they see school buses that only have a few kids on it. So that's something that came up several times in the survey. When they see buildings that aren't fully utilized and yet we're asking for higher investments from property cares, property cares towards revitalizing schools, it creates frustration and a lack of transparency from them because they don't think that ASD is taking care of its business by not shrinking its footprint commensurate with the students we've lost.

So it comes up in different ways. So I've seen your perspective and I've also seen some more nuanced perspectives that they want to see the district make a push to right-size facilities. It's very complicated, so I'd love to dive deeply into it.

Cool. Oh, is that all?

Yep. I saw for a moment committee member Bellamy's hand was up in the Zoom. Do you still have a comment? It was, but Rachel covered it for me, that whole education piece around the benefit of closing and consolidating. It's not just about money.

And so as the committee moves forward, that, that educational piece needs to be front and center because for me personally, it's about the quality of service that we can give to every kid. So, but I'm good now. Thank you.

Um, any other comments? If not, I can put myself in just to—. I have a—. Along the same lines as that housing density question, I also wonder, there's this threshold, and then I think in high school it didn't contractually define how many students we need to be able to allocate one counselor to a school. And one per 350.

So 350 is our target to get a specialist like a counselor, probably around the same number for a music teacher, art specialist. Do these metrics exist in some form of hard assessment or staffing? Yeah, model, we can share that. Kirsten had to pop out, but we do have a staffing matrix that covers the counselors but not necessarily the positions that you're talking the music teachers. That's what you're referring to.

Yeah, I'm just, uh, because to me, you know, having been a program lead of a program like that, deciding schools to put students into— we want to reach as many people as possible, and it was very hard to justify going into these schools that have 210 students because in our program population, the 10 that might have only been 50, which is a big share of the school, but it's a lot smaller than another school like Sand Lake, which I think that's about 400 students. Um, maybe it's smaller. Smaller. Okay. Um, so the population of a school going down, it increases more class bubbles and it decreases those specialist supports so they can justify putting into school, and even if it costs more or saves less, or that, that budgeting delta is much smaller compared to the actual services delta.

Is that an accurate description? It is. For—. If you were to take 4 really small schools, they may share the same specialist who has to split their time with 4 very small schools. At the, at the end of going to different schools every day, what we saw in the past was if you had something like Bowman where you had 1.0, that teacher was there for 5 days and you used all of them.

But when they were split to multiple schools, they were only actually in a classroom for 0.8 of that 1.0 or 0.7 of that 1.0 across the week. It's not that they weren't used because principals would use that 0.2 or 0.3 or whatever it was that was left over, and they would help them cover classes that you had vacancies that day, or they could do other things within the school to keep things moving, whether it was wind time or something else. So it's not that they weren't being used during the week, it's that they weren't being used for what they were hired for. And that very much was the case It will always be. Thank you.

I hear it's like we talked about it at the board level 2 weeks ago, 1 week ago. The budget issue is one dimension of this. And honestly, I think the committee will continue to realize it's actually very narrow. But the academic services dimension as like a y-axis is very, very wide, and we have the ability to fundamentally change the vision of academic services, but the playing card is going to be school facilities.

I'd also— yeah, so I think this is very helpful. With a busy full agenda, I will give one last chance to round of questions, Member Park, if you have any. There's no way for us to see your hand raised, so just call out, interrupt us. Thank you. I'm following along and I can't think of any questions yet except for one thing.

I was wondering whether the same metric applies for counselors as it does for school nurses.

School nurse typically been one per school, then we did that regional model this year, so it wasn't really a per-student metric. Necessarily. I mean, you're still going to have one nurse at a school of 180 and one nurse at a school with 600. Um, they did—. I don't think we have any schools, with the exception of student needs, like if someone has a lot of like, uh, feeding tubes and things like that, and special needs intensive—.

Basically our intensive needs students—. There may be another nurse there for those kind of things, but not based off population.

Congratulations. Thank you. Okay, well then, moving down the agenda, thank you, Mr. Anderson, uh, for just that snapshot. I'll turn it over back through the superintendent to MJ to just give us an outline of this communications plan envisioned for the committee. Yeah, I got a couple slides, um, to pull up.

Here, and then I do have handouts if you want to do that. So, uh, um, from a communications role, uh, you, uh, from a communications role, uh, you know, we're going to be supporting the committee and the board's work, uh, really focused on making the process clear and accessible to the community, you know, which means helping people understand why the committee was established, what it is charged to accomplish, how they can work, follow the work, and then how the public can participate. We put together at least some preliminary thinking about communications, but really was intentional about keeping it broad till we got to this meeting to really kind of put our heads together to kind of start figuring out next steps. And speaking of next, you do the next slide. So really just kind of want to hear from the committee on the mission.

The vision, which is part of the next topic on the agenda, the scope, and then where we go with community partnership. But really, the first practical thing that we can do is create a central web page for this committee outlining, you know, the purpose and the scope, and as well as, you know, who's serving. And also how we can keep the community engaged. So really just kind of looking for that mission, that vision piece here, and then our scope of work, and then we can start to put together a final, more focused plan for this committee.

And I'll add, maybe if I— Dr. Bryant, to share some We had a conversation including one of your contractors, Lisa Miller, and we were discussing the opportunity for this to go on the committee's business to be cataloged on the ASC Rightsizing page. And then as more discussion develops, it will basically be a live feed of opportunities. Um, do you have a, uh, just a quick—. Could you describe that quick vision that we discussed from the beginning? This was about 3 weeks ago, so happy to—.

Steve, I can— so, and actually, I just wanted to kind of go back to what I said earlier. Uh, that plan is really more of a broad plan for you, but now that you've got your committee set, this is where we really want to dig into your mission, your vision, and then really get it launched. But your out of the gate, we want to get that webpage established. It would go on the right-sizing page. That would be the 2026-2027 right-sizing webpage.

Be that resource, it would be all about the committee and really kind of where we were going in terms of next steps. And I could see that as the landing page for messages from the committee, the agendas, all the materials, and then an archive of things from the past. Anything else that would be helpful for that page? No, I just wanted the members to see the way we're projecting the voice. It's a good point for opening questions or even responses.

So on the screen here to the members, this is really a dialogue, so you can even just answer these questions instead of ask questions. I mean, it's a dialogue space. I see Member Bellamy's hand raised on the Zoom. Yeah, just— I just wanted to add that we have a lot of this information is already in the charter. So if we can at least start there, and if we make changes, make them to the actual charter itself.

Thank you.

I do want to add one thing. You know, you have the Communications Committee. For the school board, and then can really work through that committee to support this committee as well. And then we can pick up that conversation tomorrow, you know, time permitted, based on the chair, if, if the chair is willing. Absolutely, it's on the agenda.

Is there any, um, points of discussion from President Jacobs, Member Blakeslee, Member Park, on your impressions, what— why even just yourself as an individual saw the need for this work in, in these 4 lenses: mission, vision, scope, and partnership. Because my sense is the charter is a degree above these, and it gives us basically fence around the work because we want this committee to not bleed into other business of the district. And that, that fence is, I think, very well constructed and tells us where not to go. Um, as a public relations function, we want to tell people like exactly what we're serving them with. So I would really appreciate even just one of these from each member of the committee.

Like, what is it that you yourself really wants to accomplish as a public service in this committee?

So I'll go because I'm going to have to jump off in a minute. Okay. I think, I think for, I would like for to engage the community in authentic conversations as well as give them valuable information on, uh, you know, our dream, our hopes and dreams for our kids in the Anchorage School District in an environment of declining resources, uh, and have that conversation in ways that, uh, not just give voice but also, uh, some kind of direction, uh, in terms of recommendations back to the board. So I, I just want it to be authentic. I want to engage in ways that people— so we're not just, we're not just telling people what we're doing, we are actually including their voice and their hopes and their dreams.

So that's pretty much it for me.

Thank you, Member Bellamiani.

I'm not sure I can— yeah, I can jump in. I, I don't know if it falls neatly under mission or scope or vision. Um, what I hope, um, the committee is able to, to add, uh, through its work is to truly start from scratch and answer the question, does the community support further rightsizing initiatives. And I think we have other data, but to Member Blakeslee's point, I don't think we should make any assumptions about why someone supports or doesn't support, supports future rightsizing. So really getting at that question of what the community supports, ensuring that there's an understanding of the benefits and, um, things that are detracted from when rightsizing occurs.

It's, it's not an inherently perfect good or bad process. Um, the second is to— what I really hope to see is, um, criteria that stakeholders, to include the board, agree on are important and can be used to identify campuses that may make sense for consolidation in the future, should the community support further work in this area.

Administration— when the administration engaged in that effort of engaging the community and created a rubric, it came under significant scrutiny from the public that was impacted by the initiative that was developed utilizing the rubric.

And so I'm very interested in developing a rubric that hopefully in a better way engages the community, recognizing that no right-sizing initiative, should we engage in that work, will make every single person, every single stakeholder happy.

Thank you, President Jacobs. I would hope that we could at some point look at coming up with multi-year plans that would help— it would help, uh, help us with CIPs, with bonds. And maybe it wouldn't mean that a school would be closed in 3 years, because then you're pre-telling a future board that might be a completely different board 3 years from now that that's the school you want closed. But if we could get something that would, would help us at least have groupings schools that, that we think have this multi-year possibility. It would help us with SPED programs.

It would help us with the bond for sure, as to how we prioritize where we're going to put available dollars into our infrastructure. And it would at least foretell the public that we're going to be looking at those schools, and maybe they won't be happy about it, but I think if we can start showing you know, there are benefits in the education levels of service when we combine multiple small schools and make a bigger school. And I, I think it would be nice. I don't think we're going to get to where we're naming actual schools. This one will, but it would certainly help all those other things that we do that, you know, every year if we, if we keep relooking at, do we just Do we just put Lake Otis on a bond?

Um, and then, you know, after we've submitted the bond that gets approved by the assembly, then, you know, now we're going to close it. And of course that hurts the bond when you do things like that. Um, but even building it in the first place, that would be very helpful.

Uh, Member Lakesley or Assemblymember Park, do you have anything to add from your personal perspectives about this? I see Blake's unmute. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'll echo a lot of what's already been said, but I think authentic dialogue is really important. I hear often a sort of contradiction in the way sort of the perceptions from the district level or from staff or from administration and the perspective from the public.

So It was interesting, for example, to hear, "These are all the ways that we improved and better engaged the community, like, through these community conversations," and yet from the public having a very different perspective of that experience. And so I think this is a good opportunity to better understand how to really improve the quality of those conversations so that people feel heard. Um, so just, yeah, authentic dialogue where there are conversations. It's a back and forth type of, of communication. And I also, um, just kind of piggybacking off the last sort of point that I was making about the public's understanding about why right-sizing happens.

I think as an end result, I would really like to see alignment among the board about what— how we approach right-sizing as a tool, because I think there's sometimes— I think I even hear contradictions in the way that we speak as individual board members or as a collective body, that we have to have right-sizing as a tool for the budget, and yet right-sizing is actually not a significant tool to address the budget. And so I would hope that at the end of this process, in addition to having criteria, that there's also an alignment around how the board understands right-sizing as a tool, um, and what it's actually meant for. Um, and just beyond having criteria, I think that if there were to be any future school closures, it's super important to not just have a rubric and criteria and say These are all the things that we looked at when right-sizing or closing a school or, or combining schools, but we're able to concretely show each one of those schools, this is how you fell on these criteria. Not just in general, we looked at this stuff, but to have really solid rationale that shows those schools, those hypothetical schools in the future, that you were not singled out. Or that this wasn't taken lightly, and these are all of the factors that we looked at at your specific school and how you sort of fell on that rubric or along that criteria that was established by you and many other stakeholders.

Um, because I think another piece that I found is— has been missing in the right-sizing piece or conversations is, um, yeah, there's a rubric, but then there's sort of a discrepancy about or lack of understanding about how each individual school fell, like how, you know, it was a point system, or where they, you know, how the criteria were applied, or whatever. Um, so just, I think that will— all of those things combined will help improve trust.

Thank you, Member Bixley. Anything from Assemblymember here. Yes, thank you. Um, so I have a couple of concerns. Um, I would like to see the physical buildings as much as possible retained to provide childcare and, um, not be closed, um, as, as, um, Member McDonough mentioned we are in a, a child care desert, and for many people, the cost is just prohibitive so that we do need to look at perhaps how we can subsidize some of the locations to provide child care.

I do want to see significant public engagement because we don't want to have the kind of backlash that we saw, for instance, with the closing of Campbell STEM, and that people are informed along the way sufficiently that it doesn't come as a, you know, as a shock to that, that neighborhood or that school community. And as a part of that, I would, I would mention that right down the street from my house is Abbott Loop School. The Title I school, it was one of the few schools that was a distribution site during COVID for meals because food insecurity is a real thing in this community and in less privileged communities. And a piece of piece of communicating with families in that regard is to be aware and conscious that there are a lot of reasons why community members might not reach out regarding school closures. There could be a language problem.

There could be families where, like, in, in this particular district, there are a lot of single-parent families. There are a lot of working poor families that are not capable of making the time to have the kind of engagement with the school board that might benefit their kids. And honestly, in this environment, there might be families who have an undocumented family member who are reluctant to speak out at all.

Thank you. So, we have to consider, you know, all of those variables in how we reach out to families.

Thank you, Member Clark. Very important to bring up the inclusion and the barriers to that are just structurally built in.

Um, my piece to add to this, uh, comms presentation, and then it will be right up at 1. I'll add my piece and then talk about if the meeting is to be ending at 1. But, um, I really like hearing from virtually every voice, including from the administration, the desire to be be building a more inclusive plan this time, um, where we're getting— what I would envision is every voice that wants to be heard is a voice that we build in and we put into the way that this new, like, policy track gets developed. Um, I see this as a realignment of the theories of power that go into governing Anchorage, where as a board member, I'm elected by the voters at large. So everyone on the board is.

And the Alaska Survey Research poll that we just took actually confirms that it's somewhere around 20 to 25% of voters have a child in the district. So it's a very small, like, The overwhelming majority of people who have put me here are not direct stakeholders. These decisions are not affecting them and their children this year. And we're here to be effective stewards of taxpayers and to serve the children. But there's not really a caucus of a school's actual power, which is the parents who bring their kids to school.

And so I think we've, we, we're going to have to navigate a theory of power not designed for regional caucus-based consensus building. And that's where we're going to look to redistribute and take ourselves out of the equations while we're listening and hearing what people in those schools need.

Not looking to form a new caucus at the schools, but I think we can get the effect of school-based advocacy to really pierce the veil, uh, by this committee reaching out and building out its, its voices. And a big support of that the board has given us is the recent moratorium we, we just resolved on not closing schools this year. I think that will be a nice, um, we won't need to actually exercise power, and that helps with this power dynamic. It is pushing past 1 o'clock now. We didn't really notice this is a 1-hour meeting.

I just would like to get a check-in from admin if we have any more minutes. And then from members online, I still see— well, we did have member Bellamy leave at about 5 minutes ago.

So I think we'll just keep moving down the agenda then, hearing no, uh, concerns with that. Um, next on the agenda— and thank you, MJ, for the comms presentation— next on the agenda is the charter, which, um, I've included just so that it's a part of the public notice, like the record that people can read through. Um, I wasn't sure if it had even been attached to any board business Um, this charter was built by School Board President Jacobs, and according to the mechanism we used, it is actually— the committee itself doesn't accept or adopt the charters. Um, it is like, if we need any modifications, it goes back to the president who can decide or be directed to change it. So this document from the desk of the school board president is something we can only modify by going back through the board.

But I do think we have a, a pretty strong alignment with the will of the board to get this committee's work done.

It's mostly in the agenda for members to comment if you have any further comments, um, particularly the assembly member part, because, uh, the board did discuss the charter and the red lines in the agenda are parts of what the board asked changed about 2 weeks ago. Um, and then this is, like I said earlier, a charter is just the fence around our work. It tells us where our boundaries are. Are there any questions or discussion points from the members about this document right now?

And so, like Member Bellamy said earlier, many questions about that communication, like mission, vision, scope, values— those are built into this. I think the president and the board did a really good job at articulating the large picture challenges. That right-sizing has faced and the ways that this committee is empowered to push through those challenges, especially the ways that we've defined the guiding principles and the scope of work to be much more focused on instructional opportunities, which is, I guess, our word for the superintendent saying levels of academic service. Where we're trying to predominate that right-sizing this year is going to be more studied with the basis of getting good services to kids, less than the savings of some budget result.

And that we were really interested in this equitable access piece where the red lines here at the end of the first page show that The board has asked for equity and these, these barrier lifting exercises to be a big part of the committee's work.

Um, so if there is no discussion or no questions, then what's the—. What's your red denote? Is that just like editing? Oh, the red. So everything in red is stuff that the president and I added after the board board's discussion about 2 weeks ago.

I think we had a discussion during work session, uh, because it's not a document that needs a vote. It just is what he writes up from his desk. But these are the points that the members of the board made to improve the document from its original draft. Okay, they're not comments then, just— so those are, those are the new additions to the charter since it was placed in front of the board at the work session. Okay.

And then down at the, the end of the second page has this additional participants section where, uh, from the early talks last year, um, with the president and with members of this committee, we realized that this room does not have enough voices in it for us to keep doing business in a responsible way. So today we needed to meet to basically formalize and officialize the committee. Next time we meet, I'm going to work with the superintendent and the comms team and probably the community engagement department to reach the people that are in this list here of additional participants. And we're going to begin a public search of people who are interested in serving and being a voice at each of our meetings. An additional participant— it's not an exclusive list, it just is people that will always be in our meetings or always have a seat available for them.

This committee will also take its work on the road, as it were, and we're going to be doing sort of work sessions in public spaces with non-participant, like non-seated participant, just, just go to a community and say, what is it that you want to share with us? But the additional participants will be having active voice at our, um, every time we conduct official business.

Um, that then goes us to the recruitment plan, which is item number 5 on the agenda. So, with no hands up on the Zoom, I'll move to number 5.

This is just, as chair of the committee, I will go and seek the people who will be joining us as advisory seats for our next meeting. I'm asking the members to shape what it is you want me to do in seating these new members. So I built this proposed communication plan, and it— I would like to hear your feedback on what we should be doing when we reach people, because who is at the table is such an important part of this discussion. How we have decided to invite people is a very important structural task. So this outreach plan will be a framework for myself and the superintendent's team to go and spend the next month getting new seated members.

Um, and it, it— the purpose is to get as many people, um, involved in this discussion to represent the diversity, lived experience, professional experience, and community knowledge of ASD. That, that's a lot of different, like, it's going to be a difficult task to make sure all those people are here, but we're going to work on it. Um, the outcome is that this advisory group really brings people together and that we strengthen the ability to understand rightsizing decisions. So we need some clarity. There are 6 principles that I have committed myself to, and I use your feedback.

The 6 principles on the recruitment, especially with, um, as Assemblymember Park represent— or discussed earlier, reaching people with the barriers that they have between the district and their own family, it, it can be very hard. There's language barriers, there's disability barriers, trust barriers, um, and these are 6 principles that we're committing to to follow to get as much of those barriers lifted as possible.

Especially then, who is directly invited is number 4 on this document. These are from the charter. And so these are people we're going to be directly reaching out to and saying, you can have a seat on this committee as an advisory member if you would like to.

I would ask members to look through this number 4 and let us know if there's anybody we're missing that is an essential stakeholder in our business that is not yet on this list. And you can also just tell me later if it's something you don't know now. I can—. Like, I still have the authority to add any additional advisory seats as per the charter.

And then lastly on here is how we're going to be doing a public call in a school and community outreach phase with the ASC team so that people are given the opportunity to serve in a public way and that it's open and transparent.

Are there any feedbacks or discussions from the members on this outreach? Plan as it is in front of us.

I did look into best practices. A lot of, a lot of places around the US have had these committees formed, and one of them was make sure the committee members, when they say yes, I want to do this, that they understand the time commitment. Yeah. And that they know how many times a week, how many hours each time. Because a lot of these committees either fell apart completely, and in most cases they still ended up losing.

If it goes for 6+ months, they lost about 50% of the members. So it is important for them to have an idea of what they're signing up for. Yeah, and I think we were seeing a lot of the same professional channels because our— we have 8 bullet points here in the public call section of this that has what the announcement should include. Purpose of the committee, the roles of advisory members, expected time commitment, the schedule, and whether it's in-person or virtual, duration, and the types of experiences we're looking for, how a committee member can reach us, the deadline for responses, and how to contact that if there's anything missing in that, we'd be happy to expand. It doesn't even need to be on this document.

We'll just— we can defer to you, and like, when you use Team ASC to reach people, you can add in additional layers of foresight that might be needed. I think that makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to add that I've just had some informal conversations with stakeholders, and one was the NCCAC chair who says that she's happy to support and getting as many voices into the conversation. And one of the pieces of feedback she shared with me is that there might be different ways that people want to engage in this work. So, if not a full-time commitment to the committee, they're wondering, you know, could they participate in a focus group or a survey or maybe other touchpoints where it's more accessible?

So, just food for thought.

I would say the only other thing, and it doesn't— obviously need to be decided right now is how big do you want the committee? Because if it gets so large, moving forward is difficult as opposed to— as Chair— and you even brought up the focus groups where you can collect information, but the more people that have a vote, the more difficult it is to get there. Yeah.

I don't anticipate the makeup being a larger volume of people than there are bullets in this list, which is 3, 6, 9 bullets. And that would be like if all groups that are listed on this actually have someone fully attend, I'd be shocked. I think our attrition from who we invite to who we'll be able to serve— so I envision that this will have another 8 or so additional voices, um, where we will definitely encourage the superintendent's advisory committees, the union and collective bargaining groups that are deeply impacted by this, and the other governing types like the Federation of Community Councils to have someone, um, join so that they—. Clear communication. But the idea is more that who's an advisor is a, is a representative of a broader group that doesn't need to be in every meeting, but we need to go back to their group and actually have a real dialogue with them so that when we have like the MECAC, a MECAC member on this committee, it's, it's understood that the committee is also going to go to the whole MECAC and have a real dialogue in that space.

Um, but I, I, I'll be mindful and I'll I'll let the members know. I, you know, I think anything about 10 or 12 people becomes outside of our ability to strategize. And while we're going to end up with hundreds or even thousands of voices, the type of involvement we will envision is less a committee member for most of the voices because I think it just can gum up the works. We are elected to make decisions.

At the decision-making table, it's a different level of advocacy, and we're still going to reach everybody in a different way.

I did want to then— I see no hands up. So I have a— it's along the same vein where the superintendent and I were both mentioning the concept of like focus grouping and reaching people. How does that— like, so if this committee then tasks a pretty dynamic community outreach plan, is the administration currently resourced enough to be able to carry out the scope that we're envisioning and that we've been discussing? It's a great question. I think that's a conversation that I need to have with Dr.

Okay, um, just trying to look at options, um, and, and so I'll throw them out and would like to hear if committee members have a response to this. Adding resources to the administration to support this outreach could be done as superintendent prepares the memorandum for the waterfall funding that's going to come through in September.

Is there any opposition from the committee to the encouragement that we get that the superintendent finds some resources in the waterfall funding to request from the whole board?

Does my question make sense? I'm trying to term it like a sort of bifurcated yes/no. Are you saying like use some of the waterfall funding to fund, uh, some, you know, communication support for this committee? Is that essentially— yeah, is— does the— do the members have any opposition to— now you can request what the funds are as you need to, and if, if this is not a priority of the administration, that's its own— like, you're welcome to come back and say we just decided we can't prioritize it because there's so many other needs for this waterfall funding. But if this committee is saying we feel we're going to need some resources in the community outreach.

Is, is that a— well, I'd like to hear from the committee if they feel that that's an appropriate ask, or we could work through the other channels of going through the president to get just its own memo that says the board directs this money to this So I can speak for myself. Um, I think I'd like to hear more from administration as to where they're at with being able to facilitate the committee's needs. Uh, it sounds like that's a conversation that needs to be had. Um, I also think, uh, I anticipate that there's the committee will need, um, resources of some kind. I think articulating that into an ask, um, would be helpful, um, and then the full board should decide on that.

I think, uh, the only other thing that I think is that, um, weighing that with the other proposed needs, um, that the waterfall funding can be allocated to is something the full board's going to have to grapple with. I don't know, I don't know where anyone lands on that or where I land on that. But yeah, so I think without seeing all that information, so without hearing from administration, without seeing the proposal for where waterfall funding will be allocated or could be allocated, I don't know enough to say anything else besides the committee should absolutely prepare what it might need. I think some of my initial thoughts are, I think it's reasonable for us to come forward with some sort of proposal to the board. This is how we would use waterfall funding to support this work.

But with that said, I think right now our goal was to produce some sort of proposal by September 1st, so that's right around the corner. So I may not have a full conception of what the committee even needs to to fulfill its purpose. I may not have the right dollar. We could start somewhere modest and maybe work our way up as the work continues. So one example is that there may not be the support to facilitate as many of these conversations, but what if we earmark some resources to select a partner like the Humanities Forum to help add capacity?

We could build that into the waterfall, but it would be a very modest amount. I just wouldn't be able to articulate exactly where every dollar is going to go, just between now and September 1st. That's the only thing I want to manage expectations on. Okay, makes sense to me. Um, and I appreciate not even saying, well, just give us a slush fund and then we'll let you know later.

Uh, we're being very scrupulous with that. Um, yeah, sorry, I was— it came up because I'm like, this, this level of focus grouping and other engaged study is going to be very helpful. It's also very expensive. We've cut comms' budget year after year for like the last 5 years. So I—.

Asking you to do more with less might be something where we realistically need to ask you to do more with more. Well, I think you— we got from, from, from my team, we got really great information today, you know, in terms of next steps. It's just having a conversation with the superintendent. Here's kind of what we're looking at. This is what we could do.

Ideas and then workshopping it with the superintendent and then, you know, coming back. But I think, you know, where the superintendent's going with those, um, partners, so it's a good space. Yeah. And then let's include the new senior director of engagement, equity, and compliance because, um, yeah, she's, she's new to the role and this is an opportunity to really streamline and commit the work to this. Um, on this number, Blake's number Park, do you have any discussion to— that you need to add?

No, I think it's been pretty well covered. Thank you.

Yeah, I would agree. I think that it's just important to have whatever resources may or may not be needed really clearly articulated and lined out with corresponding dollar amounts and then bring that to the full board and to Dr. Bryant. Um, yeah, okay, that's— yeah.

Well, with that, that's our last item of agenda. It says new business and upcoming meetings. So, um, if— does anyone have new business to add to the committee? I have none. Admin is shaking their head.

So in upcoming meetings, I will ask the committee to stay in touch with me as chair as, um, I then work with the administration on adding these advisory seats. So I think it's unwise that we pick a date and time now, uh, without what will be an addition of 5, 10 people that are also going to need to work with us on timing. So if that's okay with you, Member Blakeslee, Member Park, right now we won't have an upcoming meeting slated, but it'll be something we build out very soon after getting advisory seats made.

Yeah, for me, for planning purposes, for— is, you know, this is a school board committee, so, you know, should it be housed— you know, tomorrow we have our three committees— should it be should we have that pushed in for committee meetings? You know, like, it's— as you're planning this out, I, I believe so. I honestly think what we are going to be forced to reconcile is with the advisory seats, that this will have to be an evening time that we ask that very lean in how we ask the admins to join us, but I think it will— I think we're going to be joined by people with jobs that can't come at noon. So shifting, shifting this committee work meetings to an evening schedule, it will perhaps be a necessity. Um, and it— I think realistically the committee may only need 4 or 5 more meetings and then the community outreach phase is going to just take on— like, it will be empowered to happen, and that can be however and whenever it occurs, not officially business.

But I think that the community itself is only grappling with about 4 or 5 business questions that we have to meet as an official function. Um, so orientation of the new members and An overview of the community engagement plan will be our next business, and that should have advisory seats. That will likely have to be because all the superintendent advisory committees have decided they can only meet in the evening. And if we're going to be comprised of those committees, I think we're also going to have to face that timing as well. So it I will, I will get some very clear dialogue with my members in the next week or so on this, and then I'll, I'll work with the administration on— as we're inviting other seats, um, let, let's look at the realistic choices of timing.

Um, I need, I need to check. And so then, um, that's been our last Thank you. Any, any opposition to the adjournment?

Seeing none, then thank you all. 125 Meeting is adjourned. Um,.