5/19/2026: School Board Work Session

Within Anchorage in the past.

So starting with the ELA, we have, um, really in-depth integrated health studies at our kindergarten through 3rd grade levels. In all of these grade levels, we have in-depth units that are part of our reading curriculum, and They start with the 5 senses down in kindergarten, and then they become more complex as we go on. Students will have anywhere between about 7 to 20, 25 hours of direct instruction in these topics as part of their language arts curriculum. The curriculum delves pretty deep into these concepts, relates them back to science, but the manner that in which that it's done is through English language arts. I know concerns have been raised, well, what if the students are not necessarily reading at grade level.

This is all done through the knowledge side of our reading curriculum, our language arts curriculum, and so most of it is done through the oral language. So teachers are reading the information aloud. Students do have text in front of them, but the information is shared orally. Students are having discussions. There's diagrams.

All of the kind of information is available for students. So students that are not necessarily really strong readers still have the opportunity to engage in the material. And that's in our kindergarten through 3rd grade, and that focused a lot on the material that was in the Great Body Shop.

As we move on, we talk about our Applied Health and Safety, which is our PE integration. Physical fitness is very important within our education system, and we have our core concepts of physical fitness, but we also add our our seasonal awareness, making sure that our students are dressed appropriately, that they understand hypothermia, what can happen if you're not dressed appropriately, uh, that whole environmental safety that's part of our PE curriculum as it's already written. And then we have our body mechanics, nutrition, and energy. Where does that come from? How do we do that?

All of those pieces are part of our current PE curriculum and are part of our everyday life with students.

Social-emotional learning, or SEL, integration is also part of everyday life for our students. So our ASD adopted curriculum in most of our schools, it's Second Step. We also have Connected and Respected as our other approved curriculum. Those two curriculum pieces will continue within K-5. All of our teachers are being— will continue to teach a 30-minute SEL-directed block and to prioritize that within their day.

That includes all of those healthy living standards of empathy, getting along, identifying bullies, how to deal with all of those pieces. That's all part of your SEL curriculum. And then there's the daily wellness practices that again will not leave us. That's just part of being in school, washing your hands, all of those pieces that we— they work on. And our signature practices of making sure that our students are included that they're engaged, all of those parts of just being an elementary student.

We know that we have some targeted units and we will continue to offer those targeted units in the 4th and 5th grade. Some of those include human growth and development as well as some of the substance abuse prevention lessons. We want to make sure that our students have what they need as they move forward into middle school. Those lessons will be the same lessons that they have always taught through the Great Body Shop. There's just time in the day in our 4th and 5th grade world to be able to teach those.

And so we'll still be teaching those lessons and be providing training for our teachers to do that. In addition, the Safe Children's Act, which is part of our state statute as well as our school board policy, we will be making sure that our counselors and our school leadership teams work together to make sure that those lessons happen. Our mental health student supports leads have been working on when and how the counselors are trained to teach those lessons, and then as a school leadership, the leadership team will develop when exactly that happens within the course of the school day and ensure that the notification to parents is happening appropriately so that we follow state statute as well as school board guidance.

We have made sure in some deep dives here that we have made all of the state standards and the school board adopted curriculum, that everything is aligned and mapped out so that our teachers can find where everything is. So there's not this guess, what are we missing, what haven't we done? All of that is available for our teachers and everything is mapped out. We have school crosswalks that are aligned to the PE curriculum, the health curriculum, the science curriculum, the social— everything's all aligned and that's all accessible for our teachers and other experts within our teaching staff. We also want to continue to encourage that unified support model so that it's not just one person that is dealing with anything dealing with health and safety in our schools, that if we have a student who's in crisis, we have a team.

And so that we're working on making sure that the counselor, the classroom teacher, the the principle that we're all working together and that everybody is collaborating to make sure that the needs of students are met when it comes to health and safety.

What's changing and what's not? So we're increasing the time for PE next year from 90 minutes to 100 minutes weekly. That gets us to— when we add our PE time in there, that's 50 minutes a week on average of daily physical activity, which gets us very close to that required CDC 54 minutes. So we are doing really well at meeting that benchmark for the state of Alaska. Our enhanced SEL scheduling, again, both at the instructional division and within our scheduling guidelines, we are setting that 30-minute— finding that 30-minute time block, which can be really challenging if you've looked at an elementary schedule, but really finding that 30 minutes to do a solid SEL lesson using our adopted curriculum.

Next is that counselor support and really looking at that integrated model so that our counselor isn't just an add-on, but they're part of the model, part of the leadership team, and that they are in with everybody on making sure that our students feel safe and accepted and that our Safe Children's Act and our healthy lifestyle is being talked about in our schools. We wanted to make sure that the school board and the public knew what we are not asking schools to change. We are not asking schools to change the daily active play requirements of the wellness policy as are in the school board. Currently, the school board asks that schools have 30 minutes a day of active play at recess, and we want to continue that. Also, we don't want— we want to continue to support our schools and our wellness policy with the 20 minutes of active eating during lunch, which is 20 minutes at lunch, 10 minutes at breakfast for eating, and that is part of school board policy, and we are not telling schools to change that as well.

So those two pieces, I think there might have been some concern that those were being adjusted, and that hasn't been on the consideration.

So the training and implementation— the first is stakeholder awareness. That's part of why we're here, and then it's to make sure our administrators and our teachers and our educators and all of our stakeholders understand how health is going to be addressed moving forward. And so that's our stakeholder awareness. We also have our cross-district training days. And so in August, we will be working between mental health student supports and our PE teachers to start out with making sure our PE teachers understand where SEL is, as well as some of our environmental science and our other pieces.

That they are fully aware of what their standards are, as well as throughout the year we'll be doing in-depth training for our grade-level teachers on, especially our 4th and 5th graders, teachers who haven't had to teach human growth and development in some time. It used to be part of grade-level instruction, and I think most teachers who have taught out of the Anchorage School District are used to teaching those topics. Anchorage School District is one of the few school districts that actually has had separate health teachers to teach those topics, so there will be training on those particular topics. We're also going to be making sure our schools and our principals have increased awareness on resources for Red Ribbon Week and all of those other pieces so that we can really emphasize healthy health and wellness as a school school-wide effort. And then that specialized staff training.

So that's that training for the 4th and 5th grade teachers and that awareness of who in your building can you go to when you have a kiddo that comes to you with a question. So if you have a kiddo that comes to you about a concern dealing with the Safe Children's Act, something has happened to them and they're coming to you and you don't feel comfortable, who else in your building can you you talk to to bring in to have those conversations? If during a lesson about disease prevention you're not quite sure of what the latest and greatest guidelines are, who do you talk to? Is it the nurse? Where do you get that information?

And those are the kinds of things for that specialized staff training. So we're not necessarily asking extra adults in our building to be doing more training. What we're doing is we're making sure that everybody's aware of who's got what knowledge. Within our buildings and where to go to if they need additional support and how we can work with the leadership within our buildings and our district to make sure that our students have what they need.

And that is our plan at the moment.

At this point, are there any questions? We also have our healthcare services presentation. Thank you for the presentation. We'll go to Member Lessans.

Um, thank you for the presentation. I have a number of questions, and other board members may as well, but I wanted to begin with one because we received an email today suggesting that, um, I guess the question is really, do we still have access to the Great Body Shop as a curriculum, or does that curricular program expire? Do we have a license that expires at the end of this year, or does it extend to some point in the future? And if so, how, how long do we own it? So the Great Body Shop magazines that you purchase, and then we re-get the magazines, those are no longer purchasable.

We have the magazines and we have the right to own them and to use them. And so those materials are not things that you necessarily have to consume. In fact, often most of the sets have been laminated and just get reused in buildings, and so we, um, the plan is to use them as a non-consumable and have teachers just continue to teach until the time that we redesign those units as using something else. But we wanted to make sure that our students and our teachers use something that they were familiar with, and our schools that have had health in the classroom for the last couple years are familiar with great body shop, and so we didn't want to add anything new. And so that's one of the reasons we're doing that.

Plus, we didn't have funding for a complete revamp. Thanks. I guess if I can have a follow-up. So, um, I'm familiar with the CKLA curriculum. I remain pleased that the, the board and administration pursued it for CKLA.

It was a heavy lift. We were trying to align with the Alaska Reads Act, and fundamentally a program to teach students to read, and it focuses on phonics, and it has units, the components of the science of reading, and has components that are focused on background knowledge because you need the background knowledge to complement sort of the nuts and bolts work of becoming a reader, is my understanding. But it's fundamentally— and I'm looking at the memorandum from March of 2023 It's an evidence-based core reading curriculum. We adopted that as a reading curriculum, and we have a couple of board policies touching on adoption of curriculum materials.

I guess I'm, I'm really scratching my head to understand whether through hearing about the integrated health— I understand we're in a bind financially. I'm scratching my head and trying to figure out whether we are adopting something or, or not. I mean, I guess we're— I don't think we're adopting a curriculum, but I just find it very perplexing and, and frustrating that we're leaning on a reading curriculum to deliver health literacy. And I know you guys are working really hard on that, but I'm struggling. Here.

So member lessons, uh, one of the things that we have done is looked at all the curriculum that we have at elementary and seen where there's duplicative work. So in grades, even as, as far as like K through 8, we can see where sometimes there's a health lesson that's being taught in middle school that is the same exact, uh, lesson that's being taught in the science classes. And where that work is duplicative, we just decided that it was going to be taught in the CKLA curriculum. So we're not adopting a new curriculum, we're just supporting what already exists.

What we found is that the way the topics are covered in CKLA is actually a deeper understanding and gets into more of the health concepts than often the touch at Great Body Shop. Because Great Body Shop, let's say nutrition, it was just a touch. It was like an hour. Within our health curriculum, students had 18 hours a year of health. So if the student— we're hoping that the student was present for health every time they had health because it was only one day, two days a month.

So in those two hours a month, if they were there for those two hours, meaning they weren't on vacation, they weren't sick in the nurse's office or anything, they were there, and they had nutrition as one topic they would get an hour, maybe 2 hours each year about nutrition. Often it would be a review of what they had before and then a little bit more about nutrition. In CKLA, they're going to have 20 hours or more of deep understanding about nutrition, about nutrients, all the parts, how it works in the body, why you need all of those pieces, and it's going to be every day for several weeks. And so if a is absent, they're going to keep getting more understanding and have access to it because their classroom teacher is there. They're going to have the reader.

They're going to have all of that information. So it's a combination of what Sean said, which is the, the duplicating of information, but it's also a different way of instruction that we're trying to delve deeper into these fundamental concepts and relate that background knowledge and that understanding because healthy living and health health isn't a standalone. It's part of how we live. They would need to be able to read the— what's around them about health. So when they're a 5th or 6th grader and they're reading a blog or they're reading something on TikTok, they're like, that's right, I understand that now.

And we read about that, or we heard about that, or we talked about that when I was in 2nd grade when we did the nutrition unit, and then in 3rd grade when we were talking about body systems and we were talking about digestion. This is why I need to know about that. And when I was in 4th grade and we talked about drugs and alcohol, oh my gosh, this is how it all connects. And I think sometimes when we separate our subjects too much, kids don't understand the connections. And so that's part of the reason for the integration.

It's really to get kids to understand that health is all around you and it's throughout your day and reading, um, is just a way for us to get there. We, we need them to read about something, and so reading about health and wellness and body systems and science, it's a great buy-in for kids, and it's a great way for us to make sure that they understand what they're doing. We also— there, if when you look at the curriculum deeply, you're going to see that there are particular lessons and activities that the students do that you can easily take for assessments to understand if they understood the reading concepts, but you can also grade them for the health concepts. So did the student understand what the nutrition guidelines are, how many servings they should be eating, why they should be focused on healthy living, what does this mean? And so, um, it's just a different way of teaching, but I can see your point in terms of if we're going specifically for curriculum.

It's, it's whether it's integrated or not. If it helps, Member Lessons, just think of CKLA as the chip that delivers the salsa of the health curriculum.

Respectfully, I want the whole bowl.

Double dip as you wish. Double dip as you wish. Okay, I will leave that analogy behind us and go to Member McDonough. I mean, I'd like to carry the analogy and say I want to know what's in the salsa. Um, but very respectfully to both of you and the whole team, and the team from the curriculum back, you know, during the last 3 weeks hammering this out, um, I want to first warn the board and invite some sort of point of order, and I would not over— I would not even contest it if I get too far because I, I could go on for hours about curriculum.

I'll do my best to prioritize the line of questioning. The first is just to catch me up as a new board member. Fundamentally, this change was spurred because we, we have changed so much of the elementary specialist model by taking 27.5 art and music teachers away, and then that opened up this sort of cascade in addition to the PTR, which drove another about 20 reductions of specials that would be going to health and PE. Um, so I'm essentially acknowledging, is it correct to say this is spurred because the resources taken away, about $4 million from elementary specials, has caused the need to reorganize?

I think it would be fair to say that our $90 million deficit spurred all this on. Okay, but same, yeah, and the, the part of it that to build towards that, we as a board took about $4 to $5 million from elementary specials. Um, thank you. So I have a— I think to follow the question on CKLA The, the concern I have, and it's, it'll be a very broad question, which you could also say there's not a question here, but when we vet curriculum, we get together teachers of that discipline and some subject matter experts. In this case, that review team, I recall, was all classroom teachers in K-3.

And it didn't include health specialists. Is that a correct assertion from— I mean, that was like 4 years ago. So since that time, we did adopt it. You are correct, with elementary teachers, principals, whoever else wanted to come and vet it, special education, yourself, uh, through, or somebody from, uh, the Indigenous Ed, um School Board Member Lessons, I believe, looked at it as well. However, since that time, we've had both of our last two curriculum specialists, curriculum coordinators, Melanie Sutton and Joanne Osborn, have spent a lot of time within the curriculum and read through all of the health units and, and looked at how the connections were and how it duplicated what was being taught within CKLA within the health curriculum.

So we have had experts within the health curriculum look at where the crossovers were and where there might be holes. Is there an active work team, task force team, disciplinary team that will continue to have those eyeballs on fidelity as we push this forward? Fidelity or, um, fidelity to the standards and to the current infrastructure of our health that would be taught by standalone specials. So we don't have standalone specials in health, so there wouldn't be a group to draw from. However, we would continue, and we do continue, to monitor the standards at the state level to ensure that we are meeting state-level standards in all of our content areas.

So our PE teachers, who also are the ones closest to branching over health, and in most districts they are the ones that, you know, they're health PE teachers, PE health teachers, however you want to do it. Between our PE teachers and our mental health student supports with the SEL bridge, they're the ones that make sure that we are meeting the needs of all of our standards. Within this approach. So it's— we had a committee that made sure that our SEL curriculum meets the needs of standards. We have a committee that works on our PE curriculum.

We have a committee of, um, ex— you know, of teachers that work, that continually look at all of our curriculums. But we don't have health teachers in the Anchorage District at elementary level starting next school year to do that work.

Okay, that's a, um, I think 2 more, and then, or, and, and again, like I said, raise a point of order against me and I won't contest, but I will keep it to 2 more. I appreciate the slides on implementation, and frankly, if I was in the curriculum team, I would have a lot of heartburn having to implement something so fast. With so little backend support. And so hats off to you guys and your teams for taking on an impossible task. Um, and I, I hope the board understands we, we took money for away and, and had to replace it with something that wasn't yet built.

Um, I just would like to hear from your perspective, what are the risks of proceeding with an implementation that had to skip the core early steps. And I would list those as usually we would like to create a comprehensive task force to develop implementation goals and objectives and then pilot it at a certain number of schools and then do an intimate fidelity evaluation of those schools, then have that create a reiteration mechanic so that the scaling mechanism has a way of hearing upon itself. And then finally create a scaling blueprint. Those are things that a good curriculum coordinator would love to have, and the board has tasked you to do something without those. Could you help us understand the risks so that we can be very kind in the future watching a system that is struggling to be built?

I'll say there's, there's a couple issues that are— that we just have fundamentally within our elementary setting. One of the risks that we have— I'm not as concerned, frankly, with that health concepts are going to be taught in K-3 because it is in CKLA and we have over a 90% implementation of CKLA. I would be more concerned if it was a standalone curriculum because there are no minutes to teach it. If we count up the minutes within the day and the minutes that it takes for our students for reading, for math, for science, for social studies, there are not even— there we can fit the 30-minute SEL block on Mondays because we have reduced reading on Mondays because of PLCs. There is not a 30-minute time block within our day when we have a 30-minute recess every day and our lunchtime and transitions, there is technically not enough minutes in the day.

So I am more confident that students are going to get their healthy living skills this way than if we had asked our classroom teachers to teach Great Body Shop in the K-3. For 4th and 5th grade, their reading block is 30 minutes shorter each day, so they will have the time. Where I worry is getting the time to get in front of them to do the training with them. I feel confident that we're going to be able to do that this year because it's just the 4th and 5th grade teachers, and I think that if we offer enough training sessions both during the day and after, after school, compensated, that we'll be able to get to everybody. So I, I think we're going to be able to do that with the targeted 4th and 5th grade lessons.

And so I'm, I'm actually feeling okay with this. Those schools that have been doing STEM for the last couple years, I think we have a handful of schools, they haven't had a dedicated health teacher and they've been able to, to make sure that health education is happening. I'm feeling good that the Safe Children's Act, that our mental health student supports professionals are going to make sure that those Safe Children's Act lessons are happening and, and happening with a trusted adult in the school and an adult that the teachers, that the students really know well. 2 Hours a month, they may not have had that connection with the health teacher, whereas the counselor that's in their building at least half a day, half a day all year, they may be able to have that connection with that they feel that they have then that trusted adult that they can go to for the Safe Children's Act. So I think the biggest thing is that we're going to need to do some surveys and some communication with our staff so that we can learn where the holes are and figure out what their needs are.

And my, my guess is the biggest concern is going to be time, that they don't have enough minutes in the day. And that's a never-ending problem. We just don't— we have too much to teach and not enough time to do it in.

Okay, thank you. One last for now, one last question.

Reading from the board policy 5041 and abbreviating it, we have said for health curriculum or for health education that it is not the piecemeal teaching of scientific facts and risk cautions and stuff. The word piecemeal stands out to something that we gave to the administration back in 2024. It goes on to then quite extensively define the requirements of what not piecemeal is, essentially being very merit-based, evidence-based, and having undergone scientific review, which goes back to my concern that CKLA may have a lot of overlap, but it it lacks that specific ability to demonstrate that it is a merit-based, scientific-based piece of learning literature, at least to my knowledge. That is just not something that it performed in becoming an accredited curriculum. It— you can correct me on that, but It's less that I think you're picking the wrong tool, and it may be more that we need a more intentional dialogue between the way that our standard defines not piecemeal, which I think may actually be a barrier to integration when I prefer integrated curriculum.

So this is— it's more to challenge what we've explained to you and to say it's very hard to get any curriculum to match our definition of not piecemeal.

I would invite, and then I would invite response, but with that I'd say I think there's a really good conversation we can have, and the Governance Committee would like to be able to work with you on the blend of being an integrated curriculum versus a not piecemeal curriculum and being able to achieve both.

So I guess I'm going to need some clarification on your definition of piecemeal.

Means in policy, but no, I mean how you are defining it in your head right now. Before we even start to engage in a conversation, I need to make sure that we know the terms that we're talking about, because what you might be defining as piecemeal for me could mean piecemeal is people just pulling things off of a shelf or pulling things off Teachers Pay Teachers, whereas CKLA is a very well-researched curriculum And I want to understand what your definition of piecemeal is from where you're operating or where that question came from before we try to answer your question. Um, I would have to defer all the way to the 2023-24 Health Task Force teams that were— that drafted the policy. Um, it's interesting because it doesn't define what is piecemeal, but it spends about 4.5 lines defining what is not piecemeal. So if we're at least discussing in terms of the policy, I think we could go in, in committee.

I would rather not take the whole board's time to look at what the board in previous iterations has said is not piecemeal, with 4 extensive lines of description, and then make sure that we are giving you the tools of reaching that mandate. And that would make— I think that would be a lot better for all of us if we could just understand what the definitions were before we start to meet to discuss them. I'd agree that it's not worth debating right now because I, I just want to understand your question completely before I start to answer it. I think the question is in the essence of, I like the intent of the policy, but I don't understand it perfectly as a curriculum expert myself. And then it becomes very hard for you to make any changes to something that we built a policy that fit an existing model.

Now the model has to be changed. The policy then becomes an uninterpretable piece of measurement. And this is in some way a flagellation of our ability to govern. I think I'd rather lead on or lean on your leadership as curriculum experts who are currently practicing curriculum work to show us the way to blend what our vision of a not piecemeal curriculum was with the new vision of an integrated curriculum. So I'm essentially forecasting— I understand this is an incredibly difficult balance to be able to draw, and it will take a lot more time.

I'm not challenging that CKLA is not the right— I just, I think if, especially if your team believes in it, it's our duty to be able to back that up.

I would rather we agree on the way our policy reads together before we start to critically analyze the results of health.

So be ready in a future invite to the Governance Committee. I think that's where we're at.

Thank you, Mr. President. We'll go to Member Less— uh, Member Bellamy, then Member Lessans. Okay. I just, uh, um, I mean, those are excellent questions, but I do want to just remind us that one of the things we knew, that given our diminishing resources, that we needed to reimagine, change the way we deliver services, the way we structure, um, just about everything. We knew that.

So, um, with that, we also knew that our policies would have to be changed or reassessed, revised to fit whatever it is we end up— however we end up doing business. But you are absolutely correct. I think we have one policy, we have a policy on on the agenda tonight that we need to— that's a result of that. I suspect we're going to have many, many more. Um, and so in the interest of time, I will just save my questions other than to say I think the training pieces of this, uh, is— I have some questions about just to make sure that we are giving our staff time and resource to be able to do what, what we what we need them to do.

And this integrated curriculum, while it may be new to some of us, uh, I'm again the elder in the room. We've done it this way before. Uh, it— was it perfect? No. But not— this won't be perfect either.

What we were doing won't be perfect. I love the connection to CKLA. I think that is, um, our students— our teachers are familiar with that. Kids will get a more consistent approach. But we have to make— we have to do— we have to, you know, make sure that we are putting the safeguards in place and coming back and checking and making those changes, whether it's policy, resource, or staffing, as we are able to.

Thank you.

Member Lissitz. Yeah, just very briefly, I was deeply connect. I was, I worked closely with Miss Sutton in drafting this policy 2+ years ago, and just for everyone's awareness, we leaned heavily on the National Health Education Standards from SHAPE America. It's the Society for the— oh gosh, I have to remember the whole acronym— Health and PE Educator. Yes, physical education educators.

But SHAPE America really sets the bar for, for what a comprehensive health curriculum should look like. So this language is heavily influenced by their work and their research and their leadership. And I would wager that the SHAPE standards for health education from 2024 are significantly more current and hardy than the state of Alaska's, which I think date from 2007 or so. So I'd look to more recent research. Then, I mean, the state should get their act together, but just for everyone's awareness, that is where this concept of not piecemeal came from.

And a significant component of what not piecemeal meant is that students would have the opportunity to not only learn about specific topics, but have the time and space to take action, to reflect on them. So I'll leave it there. I know that we're, we're short on time. I appreciate the conversation.

Dr. Brennan, any closing comments? No, uh, although we do have another presentation we plan to provide on healthcare services. Uh, we do have 12 minutes left. Should we attempt to speed through that? Um, I defer to you and your team.

Uh, we could schedule this for a future work session or attempt to get through what we can now. I think it might be best for us to see the presentation entirety, so we— well, let's go ahead and postpone. Okay, um, at that point then, so, um, With that said, since we're not having our second portion of the health education FY27 presentation, I would entertain a motion to adjourn to executive session for the purpose of legal updates, negotiations, and contracts, effective, uh, 5:15 PM. Move to adjourn to executive session, uh, for— I have to read the whole thing. It's on the bottom of— it's on your agenda, if that's helpful.

Sorry. Move to adjourn to executive session for the purpose of legal update, negotiation, and contracts. A second made by Member McDonough, seconded by Member Bellamy. Um, seeing no opposition, we will adjourn to executive session effective 5:15 PM. Thank you.