Substitute teachers in the Sitka School District will be getting a pay bump this year.
At a Sitka School Board meeting on Wednesday (8-12-26), Superintendent Deidre Jenson said it’s always difficult to find subs.
“Subs are hard to find. Certified subs are even harder to find, and it just gives our staff some guidelines, like ‘Here, this is this is what this person is supposed to be getting,” Jenson said.
With the new pay scale, non-certified subs with a high school diploma would increase to $180 a day. Subs with a bachelor’s degree or out-of-state teaching certificate would earn $200 per day. And the pay for subs with a current Alaska teaching certificate would increase to $230 per day, up from $200.
School board member Paul Rioux wondered if they needed to go further, and suggested a bonus for someone who subs a certain number of days per year. For now, however, the board started with a pay boost. Here’s School Board President Phil Burdick.
“Hopefully that will help,” said the school board’s president Phil Burdick. “And then we’re going to take a look at it, and then maybe decide if that’s not enough. We still don’t have enough subs that we can bump the bonus or something else.”
The board unanimously approved the pay rate increase.
Utility overage
The cold winter hit Sitkans’ pocketbooks earlier this year, spiking utility bills. The Sitka School District was not immune. District Business Manager Kathrynn Hollis Buchanan said the district went over its utility budget by six figures.
“We had a $315,000 overage in utilities, mostly utilities. A little bit of property insurance, about $20,000 that surprised us, but utilities was what killed us last year,” she said.
Superintendent Jenson said more investigation into the overage is planned, to determine whether the district underbudgeted. However, she also said energy relief funding coming from the state in September will cover the extra expenses that the overage cost the schools in Fiscal Year ’26. The district has also secured nearly $900,000 in Secure Rural Schools funds, and expects more funding from the federal program next May.
In other business, the board approved a technology refresh plan for the district. It highlighted the hiring of several new teachers, and recognized Cindy Duncan for her efforts to secure Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary’s status as a Microsoft Pathfinder School, a tech incubator program.
