The plan is meant to serve as a guiding document for the city’s Historic Preservation Commission in its efforts to identify and protect significant local resources. The previous plan — which was only two pages — was drafted more than three decades ago.

The approval came after lengthy discussion spanning multiple assembly meetings. The sticking point? Appendix G, which outlines the review process for construction projects on historic buildings. 

“The reason why I didn’t want to pass the plan last time is because, without Appendix G correctly indicating for the public what to prepare for when they are involved with this process, I think it is an incomplete plan,” said Deputy Mayor Tim Pike. “Now, do I like the rest of the plan? I 100% like that, the work involved and the clarity of that is awesome, but this is a crucial piece.”

Four members of the Historic Preservation Commission spoke in favor of passing the plan Tuesday, with the caveat that Appendix G would be replaced at a later date. 

Roby Littlefield is the chairman of the commission and has served since 2009. She said the new 26-page plan has been in development for 17 years. It’s gone through at least four revisions, and included multiple opportunities for community input.  

“Our board has spent many hours reviewing and improving it to create the best possible guide for our community, and this plan is meant to help protect what makes Sitka unique, and to guide us into the future,” Littlefield said.

Assembly Member Katie Riley agreed that it didn’t make sense to delay the entire plan over an appendix that’s on track to be improved. She said with the busy tourism and fishing seasons on the horizon, it’s not a great time to call for public engagement. 

“An extensive, extensive amount of that already happened,” she said. “As reported, 17 years of planned development, as well as over 10 opportunities to engage over the past couple of years. So I feel like the people who were passionate about historic preservation probably made their voices heard.”

The assembly unanimously approved the Historic Preservation Plan, with the contingency that the permit review section sunsets after a year and is replaced before then.

NSRAA lease

The Sitka Assembly on Tuesday voted against a proposed lease agreement between the city and a regional salmon hatchery nonprofit, which requested a well-below-market rate for the lease. The lease would combine two lots that the Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association (NSRAA) is already leasing at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park. 

The park’s board recommended an $800 a month fixed rate for the next 50 years, effectively subsidizing the nonprofit, citing the value their fish hatcheries provide for the fishing fleet. The rate would be adjusted based on land value increases every 10 years.

Assembly Member Kevin Mosher said he was 100% in support of the agreement because the value NSRAA gives to the community cannot be measured.

“My position, it’s more of a policy decision,” he said. “Because even though they’re paying money, we’re effectively subsidizing them. And I believe that we should, because I believe we get that money back many, many, many times over, incalculably.”

However, several assembly members were concerned over where, or which city fund, the subsidy should come from, while still providing long-term stability for NSRAA. 

The industrial park’s enterprise fund is only a couple thousand dollars in the positive, according to Finance Director Brooke Volschenk.

Deputy Mayor Tim Pike suggested the subsidy come from the city’s general fund, which, as it currently stands, would require the nonprofit to come before future assemblies to ask for another rent subsidy.

“NSRAA made their case about their economic impact in the community. I’ve known this for years. And I totally agree with it,” he said. “They just asked the wrong group. They need to ask us. I don’t really think that an enterprise fund should be subsidizing things. We don’t want the electrical department to decide to give a cut rate to somebody just because they do good things.”

Assembly members were unanimous in their support for a low and stable lease rate for NSRAA, but said they hoped the park’s board would take up the issue again and propose revisions. 

The assembly ultimately voted against moving forward with the suggested lease in a 2-4 vote, with just Mosher and Thor Christianson voting in favor. 

The park’s board is expected to discuss revising the agreement at a future meeting. The assembly will separately consider extending NSRAA’s current lease, which is set to expire in May, to give everyone more time to find a solution.

Sitka’s local bookstore celebrated its 50th birthday on Saturday. Throughout the afternoon, locals wandered into the downtown shop to buy a book, eat a cupcake, and reminisce on five decades of the community hub.

50 years ago, to buy a book, Sitkans had to call up the bookstore in Juneau and have it mailed to the island. So in 1976, three families came together to start Old Harbor Books  — a place where Sitkans could gather and find nearly every genre of book: from philosophy and classics to best sellers and Alaskan authors. 

“The vision was to have books, and to make sure that Sitka had an opportunity to be a literary community. Sitka deserved to be a literary community,” said board member Roger Schmidt, who grew up in the bookstore.

His parents helped open the place when he was seven and his sister Laura was nine. They spent weekends selling seashells out front and screenprinting tote bags with the bookstore logos still used today. And they spent their down time reading every book they could get their hands on. 

“My dad had this passion, everybody had this passion, which was: people need to read books, and they need to have access to lots of books, and they need to have access to lots of different ideas,” Schmidt said. “So not just, ‘We’re gonna have the best sellers,’ but whatever the subject, books are so critical to learn. Living on an island, books were our pathway to knowledge.”

Schmidt says a large part of the mission of Old Harbor Books from the beginning was to give back to the community. Instead of taking a paycheck, the owners made the decision to use the profits to support local organizations, by doing things like subsidizing — or making free — their rental space upstairs.

“The vision for the business was never to make money,” he said. “It was to pay employees well, and then it was to be able to support the community in every way it could, and it’s done that for 50 years in all kinds of ways.”

Bookstore manager Ashia Lane says the bookstore continues to work with the Sitka Public Library and schools, sells tickets for local events, and for years, even had the “Book Boat,” which traveled to surrounding communities like Tenakee Springs, Angoon, and Kake to deliver titles to folks who didn’t have access to a local bookstore. 

“We’re trying to continue community service via the bookstore,” she said. “We will deliver books to the jail if you find yourself unfortunately over in the Sitka local lock up for the weekend. We’re really trying to not just be for private consumers.”

Despite community involvement, it wasn’t always easy keeping the doors open. Just like bookstores across the country that found it hard to compete with the dawn of online shops and e-books, so did Old Harbor Books. So they pivoted, and expanded their local inventory to include games and puzzles, book-themed items, cozy candles and blankets, and even art supplies. And according to Schmidt, they began to rely more on rental income to keep the bookstore going. 

“The most encouraging thing is that it seems like people love books again, and thank goodness for that,” he said. “We were so worried around 2000 when it just seemed like people were turning away from books, and they were not passionate readers. And it just feels so hopeful that people want to read books, and they want to read books in their hand. It’s just really great.”

The bustling anniversary party is a testament to that fact, as dozens of adults and children mill about the space sifting through book titles and looking at posters speckled with collaged photos of the bookstore throughout the years.

For Sherry Foster, a retired third grade teacher, the bookstore is part of the reason she chose to live in Sitka. 

“We moved here in ‘76 and when we saw that there was a bookstore, we said, ‘Well, that’s it. Then we’re gonna stay.’” she said. “It was a given. If there’s a bookstore, it’s an okay place to live.”

And Foster isn’t the only one who thinks Old Harbor Books is a local treasure. Rhiannon Guevin’s first job was working at the bookstore, tidying shelves and ringing people up at the register. 

“Old Harbor Books is one of my happy places in Sitka,” she said. “Like the minute I walk in the door, I just feel a welling of joy.”

She describes herself as “anti-Amazon” and made a vow to herself years ago that if she’s going to buy a book, it’s going to be from Old Harbor. 

“And I think that there’s like a weirdly large number of people for such a small town who feel the same way,” she said. “Especially in these times, I think supporting local businesses is of the utmost importance. If you want to have something in your community, you have to support it.”

Many rural communities throughout Alaska don’t have a local bookstore. For a town of about 8,400, Sitka is pretty unique. 

Karen Hegyi first supported Old Harbor Books 30 years before she actually moved to the community. It was the summer of 1983, and she was visiting Sitka on a kayaking trip with a friend. 

She’s lived all over rural Alaska, and she says it’s wonderful that she gets to live in a place like Sitka with such an incredible bookstore.

“The fact that it’s endured for 50 years is a testament to the people who run the bookstore and to the community too, that it’ll be here for another 50 years,” she said.

If these party-goers have anything to say about it, it probably will be.

Amidst a sea of 11 other Republican gubernatorial candidates, Shelley Hughes argues that she stands out as not “Anchorage-centric.” At a campaign event in Sitka last week [4-8-26], she said she’s lived in several communities across the state, including Hoonah, Bethel, and her current home in Palmer.

“Part of my heart is in every region where I’ve lived, and I’ve heard from people in southeast and the different communities I visited [say] ‘We get forgotten by the governor. The governor gets in, they come down here and campaign, and then they forget about us.’ I will not forget about you,” says Hughes. “I’ve got family in this area, and you’re important. Every region of the state has something to contribute, and is important, and I’m ready to step up and offer my skill set to Alaskans.” 

Hughes has served four years as a state representative and over eight years as a State Senator for the southern Matanuska-Susitna Borough. She says that her decade-plus of experience in bipartisan collaboration makes her a suitable leader to collaborate with a president as “pro-Alaska” as Trump. 

Hughes is currently vetting Lieutenant Governor candidates, hoping to have them take on more responsibility in helping lead her initiatives in a way that she says “hasn’t happened since territorial days.”

One of her top priorities as governor would be to diversify Alaska’s economy away from oil, and lean into alternative energy sources like geothermal and hydroelectric power. 

She also says changes are needed for the Alaska Marine Highway System, which has uncertain funding and declining ridership. Hughes says local partnerships could help.

“I think if we did a private partnership, and maybe had restaurants or bands or things like that on the ferries, people might choose it as an alternative. I think we could get some more independent travelers,” says Hughes. “And I think there’s a revenue stream there. And under the state DOT they don’t have the flexibility to do that kind of thing… but I would also look at where does it make sense, as far as shortening routes by putting in some roads where we can, so we can have a good system that meets the needs.”

On the topic of education, Hughes believes that there should not only be better funding to support teachers, but also vocational training programs. She says schools should also help students prepare for the wide variety of high-paying jobs the state offers that don’t require a college degree. Hughes says this is important given that one in three Alaskans is on public assistance and Medicaid.

“I’ve heard from employers who’ve offered them raises because they’re good workers, and they turn it down because they’re going to lose their Medicaid, for example, and they need their insurance for their families, and that’s a broken system,” says Hughes. “So we need to go in there and fix that system and make sure those people have opportunity for the kind of jobs where they can make the kind of money that you can live [in] and afford a home [and] afford your groceries.”

Regarding environmental regulation, Hughes hopes to hire a Fish and Game Commissioner who shares her perspective on balancing environmental and development concerns. Hughes says she plans to increase trawling restrictions and increase game so that rural Alaska Native residents can participate in subsistence hunting regardless of where in the state they choose to live. Hughes says she wants to partner with federal agencies to develop preventative measures for natural disasters brought on by global warming. On the flip side, she’s also optimistic about the agricultural development opportunities that a warmer climate could bring.

“Scandinavia is on the same latitude on the globe that we are. Now they have a warm ocean current, so it’s a little warmer, but their export for [agricultural] products and food is $10 billion a year,” says Hughes. “We’re going the other direction, we’re importing $3 billion. And so I see a lot of potential there, and when, with a little bit of warming, we can take advantage of that.

Hughes says that more agricultural work opportunities could also attract a wide variety of working-age people to Alaska. 

Hughes also talked about transferring government-owned land to private owners, infrastructure development, optimizing the state budget, and public safety reform during her two-day long stay in Sitka.

Sitka students will have to wait a bit longer for their summer break this year. District staff made the announcement to parents on Thursday. They said the school year will be extended by two days to make up for unplanned closures this winter. 

Sitka — and communities across Southeast Alaska — saw persistent snowfall over the past several months, prompting school officials to close Sitka schools for three days. 

The adjustment will make up for two of the three snow days in March. The district has been granted a waiver from the state’s department of education for the third day.

Students’ last day of school is now May 22.

The Sitka Assembly interviewed two candidates for municipal administrator during a public meeting Thursday night (4-9-26).

The city has been advertising for the role since current administrator John Leach submitted his resignation in October. He will step down from the position later this year.

The two candidates interviewed Thursday were Jenny Alber and Steven Dahl. 

Alber currently works as the deputy director of the City of New Orleans, Department of Safety and Permits, according to her application. She has a law degree from Charlotte School of Law in North Carolina, as well as a master’s in public administration from Auburn University in Alabama. She also earned an associate’s degree from Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka in 1993. 

Dahl has worked most recently as a city administrator for two cities in Oregon, Dundee and Drain, according to his application. He has a law degree from Willamette University College of Law in Oregon, as well as a master’s in business management. 

The assembly had intended to interview a third candidate Thursday night, but he withdrew his application for the position. 

Assembly members took turns asking the candidates questions ranging from how they’d address differing community perspectives on tourism to their history working with labor unions and budget deficits. 

Assembly members held a 45-minute executive session to discuss the two candidates after the public meeting. They didn’t choose a replacement yet, but will be reaching out to both applicants to schedule further interviews.

Crouched down in the engine room of the 50-foot vessel, Ben Matthys is showcasing the completed hybrid engine to Senator Lisa Murkowski, answering any follow-up questions she has. He’s the lead technician who joined the project four years ago. The project was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy as part of a pilot program to make commercial engines cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

Sitka fisherman Jeff Turner owns the boat. After hearing about the grant, Turner was quick to volunteer his boat for the project. Yet on the two trips Turner took prior to Murkowski’s visit, a third-benefit was revealed, one that both Turner and Murkowski agree is “transformational”: 

“The noise pollution is something I really notice,” says Turner. “A quiet boat is fatigue free. I mean, you’re talking in a normal voice. You don’t have to yell across the deck.”

The team behind the hybrid engine plans to continue collecting data from the Mirage throughout the summer fishing season, logging the data in a publicly available document. That way, fishermen can decide whether they would like to install a hybrid engine as well. Another boat from Juneau is already lined up to be the second boat to have the hybrid engine installed. Turner says he’s excited to be a part of the development process to make the engine the best it can be for fishermen now and in the future. 

“I want to take advantage of the system. I want to see what it can do,” says Turner. “And I want the next person, and the next person, to learn from it. They’re collecting data on every single piece of equipment there, and what’s it gonna be in five years, ten years.”

Additionally, with concerns over outmigration and fewer young people staying in Alaska, the hybrid engine offers professional opportunities that could help retain and attract working-age people in the state. Chandler Kemp, the project’s enginee, believes that their partnership with locals in developing the engine is a promising example for future developers. 

“And so it’s not a case where we’ve hired a contractor to come in and build the project and then leave,” says Kemp. “Instead, we’ve invested locally to support people that want to do this type of work, and now have the expertise to do it more independently.”

But the promise for professional development is not without its obstacles, as highlighted by Linda Behnken, the executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association.

“There isn’t anybody in this country yet making these systems,” says Behnken. “There is a electric outboard maker that we want to use on a mariculture boat. But there isn’t anybody certifying marine certified batteries in this country yet, or building these systems.”

Batteries for electric vehicles are already proving a problem to transport. Alaska Marine Lines no longer ships electric vehicles to the state, and the ferry system highly restricts them. 

Murkowski says it needs to be addressed for the technology to move forward.

“The whole discussion about how you move an electric vehicle to Alaska, we can’t put them on these container ships anymore because of the danger of the fire,” says Murkowski. “So we’re going to have to figure this one out pretty darn quick.”

Nonprofit tribal organization Sealaska Heritage Institute has published a new book that presents Tlingit Raven stories for the first time in the original language with English translations.

The 860-page volume brings together 50 stories by seven Tlingit storytellers born between 1870 and 1915 across Southeast Alaska. The stories were transcribed from recordings of oral performances and include some of the oldest known recordings of these stories told in Lingít.

75-year-old Ḵ’ashgé Daphne Wright grew up listening to her aunt, Katherine Mills, tell her stories of Raven, a cultural hero, world-maker, and trickster figure among the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska.

“I can just remember we’d be sitting in the kitchen, around the kitchen table, and it was maybe in the evening, with everyone just kind of sitting around and just listening,” Wright said. “[It was] kind of a warm feeling, just listening to my aunt’s voice.”

Growing up, Wright spent school years in Juneau and summers with her family in Excursion Inlet, a cannery near Hoonah. Her mom and aunt spoke Lingít with her grandmother, but she says she and her sisters and cousins never learned. 

Wright says reading this book, which features stories from her aunt who was born in 1915 and died in 1993, is like hearing her aunt’s voice again. 

“I miss her so much, and I miss my mother,” she said. “They were fluent speakers. They were the generation that went to school and didn’t know English. And so they suffered. They suffered greatly. That was the reason why their kids grew up not speaking. And we never thought about it. We never said, ‘Teach us Lingít.’ We were just kids. We just ran around. And so it just means so much that there’s something here and an actual physical book that has her stories in it.”

This volume has been more than four decades in the making. It’s the fifth in a series of books from Sealaska Heritage Institute called the Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature, and is the first in the series to be exclusively focused on Raven.

Will Geiger is a research specialist with the Southeast nonprofit, and has been working on transcribing, translating, and editing the stories for this volume since 2017.

“The intention of this series is to present standout examples of the Tlingit oral tradition in a written form that gives them a pretty high level and serious treatment, so that people, whether you do speak Lingít or not, you’re able to appreciate the depth and the artistry and the history and the richness of ideas that have been carried through the Tlingit oral tradition,” Geiger said.

This book features a transcribed version of the original recording on the left hand page that tries to reflect exactly what was said and the rhythm in which it was said. Featured on the facing right hand page, there’s an English translation. 

Geiger says Raven is probably the most highly developed character in the Tlingit oral tradition, with stories ranging “from the sacred to the scatological.” In one story of Raven, he steals the sun, moon, and stars to bring light to the world. In another, Raven loses his eyeballs after removing them from his head and instructing them to watch guard for him. He fails to act on their warning that people are coming near and the eyes are taken away, so Raven makes do by placing blueberries in his eye sockets.

“Mostly, he appears in the form of a person,” Geiger said. “And he can change forms. At minimum, he’s a little rock, a person. He puts on the skin of this kind of snipe-like bird with a long bill, and flies around like that. He turns into a woman, a little hemlock needle. Oh, and a raven. He turns into a raven too.”

Geiger says while there’s a long paper trail of writings about Raven, up until this book, they’ve all been in English, with the exception of a paperback from the 1970s from Tlingit Readers, Inc. that was published only in Lingít to be used by those who already spoke and understood the language. 

“That is the one text I believe in all of history until this one, to actually reflect a Lingít Raven story as told in Lingít by a Tlingit person,” he said.

For Lgeik’i Heather Powell Mills, a Lingít language teacher in Hoonah, hearing or reading these stories in the original language leads to deeper understanding. And now, she says, people will get to experience these stories from the mouths of their elders long gone, with the same cadence and the same emotion.  

“Hearing our language is like medicine to us,” she said. “And hearing the stories of creation helps us to better understand and explain to our children how important it is to coexist with the animals, to have a strong connection to the land, to understand where you come from, in order to know where you’re going.”

Mills’ great grandmother Susie James and her husband’s grandmother Katherine Mills are both included in the book. She says throughout her life, she’s seen many drafts, and she’s grateful people spent the time to sit down and record their elders’ stories so that they can be shared for generations to come.

“We don’t have the time we used to have to spend the winters together, sitting and transferring that knowledge,” Mills said. “I think this is a great way for us to learn, and to be able to not only learn with these wonderful, ancient ways of being, but learn through our language. It was their dream for us.”

The book, Yéil Kundayaayí, Adventures of Raven, is currently available through Sealaska Heritage Institute’s website. Geiger says they also hope to make the original audio recordings of these stories available in the near future. 

Murkowski strongly urges Alaskans to make their voices heard on the new Tongass plan that’s being created for the next 15 years. The public comment period ends on May 6th. Many environmentalists and organizations have critiqued the proposed land management plan. They say it gives minimal attention to commercial fishing and cultural subsistence practices, while placing heavy emphasis on logging and large-scale tourism development.

“You have an administration in play right now who is very, very aggressive, leaning into resource development, including on the timber harvest and management side,” says Murkowski. “We get that, but we also recognize that the Tongass is a multiple use forest. Always has been, always will be. And so we need to hear from not only those that are speaking on the cultural and the subsistence side, but on the tourism side, all the other activities that go on within the Tongass.”

Additionally, the planned relocation of the U.S. Forest Service’s national office to Salt Lake City has also raised environmental concerns and how it could potentially result in the relocation of an already minimized workforce in Alaska. Murkowski says that she anticipates Alaska to be “untouched” by the change. However, she says she is continuing to closely monitor the situation, as there are still some areas of uncertainty. They don’t know which positions would be relocated, and what that would mean for the science office in Juneau.

“I think it’s really important that we retain this office and the people so this effort to try to get more forest service folks out of Washington, DC, into the West [continues],” says Murkowski. “I think we’re asking the right questions. I think the jury is still out in terms of whether or not we’re getting the answers that we need in order to do the work.” 

Another regional hot topic is funding for the Alaska Marine Highway System. Murkowski helped steer over $700 million to Alaska’s ferry system through the bipartisan Infrastructure Act under the Biden administration. In her annual address to the state legislature, Murkowski said that she was “very disappointed” with the Alaska government’s management of the federal funding. While she says she is moving forward with various initiatives to secure more funding, Murkowski says nothing’s guaranteed. 

“I’m trying to be confident with all things…But it’s a $78 million hole. That’s substantial,” says Murkowski. “I want to make sure that what we have is a marine highway system that is standing on its own. That the state of Alaska has made a commitment towards… It is the Alaska Marine Highway System. It is not the Federal Marine Highway System.”

Additionally, the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI initiatives have drawn scrutiny over the qualifications for the Section 8(a) program, which impacts small businesses and Alaska Native Corporations. However, Murkowski says there is bipartisan support for the program, which she says has been hugely beneficial for Alaska. 

“The delegation has been very united on recognizing that when this program was created many decades ago, it was to not only provide economic empowerment, it was really designed to help fulfill one of the promises under [the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act] in terms of self determination,” says Murkowski. “And so I think part of this is just a failure to fully understand what that means and why it was established in the first place.”

Outmigration is an increasing concern in Southeast Alaska, with roughly 24% of all Alaskan workers living outside the state. Murkowski says that retaining Alaskan residents is of the upmost importance to her as a senator and a mother, with one of her sons living outside of Alaska due to the perceived lack of opportunity. However, Murkowski says she is highly optimistic about the growing unique professional opportunities and lifestyle benefits that Alaska has to offer. 

“There is a lot of cool stuff that is going on that should be exciting for young people, but excitement doesn’t pay your mortgage. Excitement doesn’t get you into a house or help you afford the cost of groceries,” says Murkowski. “But we have a bonus here in this area, and that is not only a natural beauty of our surroundings, but a generosity of heart with people that make it really special, even during some tough times.”

The Senate is currently in recess until April 16th.

Aaron Dupuis is the area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. In an interview with KCAW on Friday, he said the fishery was in a transition.    

we’re kind of, kind of transitioning into spawning mode for the fish. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been following this tremendous biomass of herring coming into the sound for the last two weeks or so, since we’ve been out on the water. And Yeah, normally when they start coming in, we have really good, dense balls, aggregated schools. And then as we get closer to spawning and then into spawning activity, we’ll see those big schools break up, thin out, hit the bottom, get into the shallows, and start spawning. 

State managers observed around 18 nautical miles of spawn during aerial surveys today/Friday. Spawn was concentrated from Watson Point to Harbor Point, Kasiana Island, along the causeways, along the eastern side of Kruzof Island, and along the shores of Krestof Island. 22 cumulative miles of spawn have been recorded near Sitka since March 30.

The state did not open the fishery to a commercial harvest today, but they’re not finished yet. Dupuis said typically as spawning kicks off on the north end of the sound, the fishery shifts to the south. 

So like the Alukina Bay, Cape Baranof, down to Dorothy narrows is kind of where we’re going to start looking next. But if I learned anything so far with Herring is that they can surprise you, so we’ll kind of be looking everywhere they can show up, where you least expect them.

Around 20 seiners have been participating in this year’s fishery, less than half of the total permit holders, and three processors are participating. The state opened the fishery for this year’s first commercial harvest on March 27. As of April 3, they’d caught over 6000 tons of herring, just a fraction of the 35,000 quota allowed by the state. 

Sitka school leaders say the budget scenario is worse than they thought, which could lead to a reduction of up to 16 staff, depending on which budget scenario the Sitka School Board ultimately chooses. While the board did not make a decision at its meeting on Wednesday (4-1-26), the message from the audience was clear.  

The Sitka School Board is staring down the barrel of a budget deficit next school year that has continued to grow.

At a meeting on April 1, the group considered three possible scenarios that would leave them with a balanced budget. The plan with the most severe staff reductions would cut 16 staff, including 10 teaching positions. The best case scenario for staff would still cut 12 positions. Some of those cuts would be teachers who are already retiring, but their positions would not be refilled.

School Board President Phil Burdick said the situation was “dire” no matter what they choose.

“We have no money. There is no money coming from the state. All scenarios look like we can either spend down our fund balance and all of the Secure Rural Schools we think we’re going to get, and the Secure Rural Schools money we have,” Burdick said. “And if we don’t, then we are going to cut deeply into staff. That is a super rough synopsis. No money, staff cuts.”

Cutting more positions could mean keeping some money in savings, depending on how much the district receives in federal Secure Rural Schools money–that’s a federal program that supports schools surrounded by federal lands which don’t contribute to the local tax base.

The budget deficit is worse than what was presented to the board a little over two weeks ago. At that time the district anticipated a status quo budget would leave them with a deficit of between $1.2 and $2 million, depending on whether the district’s health  insurance costs increase. 

But since then, district staff discovered a “significant error” in their accounting spreadsheets to the tune of around $800,000 in unaccounted for expenses. Superintendent Deidre Jenson pointed to several reasons for the error – a late audit, a rushed budget process, and historical knowledge lost from staff turnover, as well as an antiquated budget system on an Excel spreadsheet. 

“[In the] hurried process, then things get missed a little bit. We don’t double check quite as easily or thoroughly. And that’s where some of this has come up,” Jenson said. “[A] hurried process just makes for room for errors.” She said the district does not have an accounting system that actually helps build the budget, and investing in a new program would prevent issues like this from occurring in future years.

The news leaves the district with even less wiggle room in the budget for next year. Sitka’s assembly has already committed to fund schools to the cap or maximum allowed by state law, plus additional non-instructional funds. The district had already instituted a spending freeze, and is anticipating some savings from that- all scenarios suggest spending the full amount, around $500,000. So the question now is whether to spend most of the money the district anticipates it will receive from Secure Rural Schools. The federal funding pool that could be as much as $1.7 million, but 2025 and 2026 disbursement amounts are not yet confirmed, and are still subject to assembly approval.

Educators and administrators advocated on behalf of their schools to the board, calling for them to choose the scenario that cuts the fewest staff. Many, including Blatchley Middle School science teacher Alex Dailey, said more cuts just weren’t sustainable. 

“If you look in the last 12 years, you’ve gone from over 100 teachers to 66. You know, that’s a third of the colleagues that I work with,” Dailey said. “I started in 2020, and the number here was 94 when I started. That’s a third of the people that I’ve worked with that I’ve seen go.”

“To cut us down is going to be brutal for our kids. There’s hope on the horizon. We don’t know who the governor is going to be next, but it’s guaranteed it’s going to be friendlier to education, whoever it is,” Dailey continued. “Please, hold out, until then for us and for our kids”

Some board members, including Paul Rioux firmly opposed the scenario that would cut the most staff.

“I’m definitely a hard no on one, and I think that it’s irresponsible for us to not take a look at if we have another $700,000, what would it be possible to keep,” Rioux said.

Keet Gooshi Heen music teacher Susan Brandt-Ferguson said the board should spend the money now and not save it for a rainy day. 

“So you might think that it’s risky business to maybe be short on the expenses…It’s risky to not keep these teachers,” Brandt-Ferguson said. “Please understand budgeting with a school district is so different from budgeting for a family, budgeting for a business, budgeting for an assembly. We can’t make money. We are always at the mercy of someone else, and so all we can do is spend the money that you have, or that you think you probably will, maybe, hopefully have. That’s your job. Please spend it.” 

But board member Tom Williams felt the opposite approach was the risky one. 

“What’s the risk of funding a school year, and we don’t have the money to finish it, and those teachers don’t get a paycheck after December? Is that more of a risk than being conservative and funding what you have?” Williams said. “[If] the money doesn’t come in, what’s the impact to that family? I think it’s worth being honest up front with what you have, not necessarily what you hope to get.”

Both he and board member Amanda Williams voiced discomfort with building a budget on Secure Rural Schools money the district has not received yet. 

More numbers are still up in the air, like where health insurance costs will land. The board did not make any decisions at its meeting, and agreed to meet again on April 23 to discuss the budget further. The board is required to finalize its budget and submit it to the assembly by May 1.