“Childcare is one of our initiatives that the Sitka Chamber has been focused on for the last couple years, because we heard from all of our membership that it, this is a challenge for them,” said Executive Director Rachel Roy at a recent meeting.

Roy invited two childcare policy experts to join her for the virtual summer speaker series on Wednesday (7-8-26). Melinda Garrett and Sheri Penney, from the national Bipartisan Policy Center, shared information on successful childcare funding models enacted across the country. 

They focused on three distinct frameworks, like the “tri-share” model which splits the cost of childcare between the employer, employee, and a third party funder. Garrett said when they look at how to finance childcare, they’re looking for ideas that are both sustainable and adaptable on different scales. 

“We know a lot of times we see a lot of band aid, or triage, funding to childcare,” Garrett said. “So when we look at financing models, we want to figure out durable funding…that can last beyond a budget cycle or even a political administration.”

Penney and Garrett will be in Sitka in early August to participate in a local childcare funding summit.
You can listen to their full presentation here:

At its meeting on Wednesday, the group discussed a set of survey results from parents, students, and teachers, and honed in on a recurring issue highlighted in the feedback – communication.

Gretchen Kelly is a parent representative on the committee. She said there were times when she did not know her child’s location, after changes in student activity  travel plans were not communicated with her. She said communication is crucial at a boarding school like Mt. Edgecumbe, when parents are often hundreds of miles away. 

“Communication to parents from any school setting is super important,” Kelly said. “Parents are always going to want it, but when we can’t see what the kids are doing, when we’re not there to hear, ‘Oh, hey, we can only take 10 kids instead of 20,’ then the communication aspect becomes more important, not less.”

Dorothy Chase, the committee’s alumni representative, said the need for better communication extends to academics. Parents want to hear from teachers more often, and not just when their kids are struggling.

“When my children were, my daughters were there…I used to get phone calls, just telling, giving an update, and saying, ‘Oh, it’s so wonderful to have your child in class,'” Chase said. “It doesn’t have to always be a negative thing. We don’t need to get phone calls that are just negative.”

The committee discussed several areas where communication can be refined, from teachers and administrators increasing parent outreach, to residential staff improving its dialogue with students.

Joel Isaak is the committee’s tribal representative. He said parents and students are engaging with three branches of the school experience- academic, residential, and administrative. That makes communication more complicated. Isaak said the school needs to develop a streamlined approach so families can navigate all three. And since most parents aren’t in Sitka, Isaak said they needed to create virtual spaces for parents to engage. 

“If you’re in a community where you’re going to sporting events locally, or going into the school, you start to network with the parents who you might see at a performance, or whatever it is,” Isaak said. “How do we virtually create that, or how do you distance create those types of networks when you’re interacting with those three facets of Mount Edgecumbe?”

Several tools for improving communication were referenced, from specific apps the school can adopt, to mass emails and newsletters.

Susan McCauley is a Mat-Su-based educator and administrator acting as a co-facilitator for the ad hoc committee meetings. She said instituting an app at her school was a game changer. But, reflecting on the comments, she said the communication issues seemed two-fold. The method of communication needs work, but also policies and ethics behind it. 

“Just because somebody implements a way, a method, whether that’s a program or something else, does not mean that those other things happen automatically,” McCauley said. “There still have to be expectations for when routine regular communication is supposed to occur.”

The ad hoc committee will meet monthly this summer with plans to make recommendations about school improvements to the state board this fall. Its next meeting on August 12 will focus on residential life. The ad hoc meetings are virtual and open to the public. 

Dr. Nicole Caraway, veterinarian and owner of Pets Choice Veterinary Hospital, said she suspects the illnesses may be related to medications or other substances that can be present in human waste. 

“My best guess is that this was marijuana intoxication secondary to ingestion of human waste,” she said. “However, I cannot prove that, and so there’s no way to be certain. That’s just my best guess based on my 24 years of experience.”

Three dogs were brought to emergency care over a 12-hour period. Two had been exploring the area around Tom Young Cabin, near Goddard Hot Springs, about 16 miles south of Sitka. The third was exploring Back Beach, near Sitka’s national park. She says the dogs were acting “drunk” and struggling to walk. They were also cold and twitching, hyper-responsive to noise and touch, and had no interest in eating or drinking. 

“[That’s] very alarming when you don’t know what’s going on, and you think that your dogs might actually be dying,” she said.

Caraway said all three dogs fully recovered after 48 hours of being treated with IV fluids.

She said if her clinic had gotten samples of the ingested fecal matter, they could have sent it out to be tested for substances. They also could have used the same urine drug tests that are often used on humans, but she said they’re not always accurate. A negative result doesn’t always mean it’s actually negative. 

“A test is not a necessity in every single case,” she said. “It’s not necessarily going to change what we are going to do. It just gives us peace of mind as a possible explanation.”

Dogs ingesting marijuana or even opioids or methamphetamine is not uncommon. There are reports of pets across the country that are exposed to substances through human feces. Caraway said while it happens in Sitka too, it’s unusual to see so many cases over such a short period of time. 

Caraway asks Sitkans to keep their dogs safe by using a leash, or keeping them under close control while on local beaches to prevent them from eating human or wildlife feces.

“It’s part of our job of keeping our pets safe, because we all know that dogs will be dogs.”

She said Sitka is fortunate to have two full-time vets, with emergency care available 24/7. If a dog suddenly becomes wobbly, excessively sleepy, or starts acting strangely after a beach outing, she said owners should seek veterinary care immediately. 

She also reminds Sitkans to properly dispose of or pack out human waste to help keep both animals and community members safe. 

“What we’re really striving for as we move forward past these sort of a structural meeting today, is a real organic open dialogue where folks can share their feelings,” Reid said. “We’re going to share a lot of data that we’ll be going over to determine what our recommendations will be come October, but, but our hopes is that is that we have a type of setting where everyone’s invited to have their voice being heard

The committee is made up of parents, students, an alumni representative, a tribal representative, a state board of education member, and a member of the school’s advisory board.

Reid co-facilitated the meeting with Susan McCauley, a Mat-Su school administrator and policy expert. They gave committee members a homework assignment– to review parents, student and staff feedback from a recent quality of education survey to inform their discussion at the next meeting.

“Some of you have multiple hats. You’re an alumni, you’re a parent,” she said. “Some of you have perspectives of working in education yourself. We certainly have a student perspective, so it isn’t that the survey data alone is going to inform the recommendations of the committee. Your experiences, your opinions will inform those recommendations.”

The ad hoc committee will meet for the second time on Wednesday, July 8 from 1 to 3 p.m. on Zoom. The meeting is open to the public. Click here to attend.

A section of Halibut Point Road was closed to traffic for two hours on Saturday (7-4-26) after an unsecured trailer carrying a boat flipped near Sitka’s downtown roundabout. 

Police Chief Mike Hall said the pickup truck towing a single-axle trailer with a 20-foot boat was passing Swan Lake inbound when a tire on the trailer blew. The trailer detached from the truck and flipped. Hall said the boat wasn’t properly secured to the trailer, and the trailer wasn’t properly secured to the truck. 

Four firefighters and three police officers responded. They closed Halibut Point Road from Spruce to Erler Street, and rerouted traffic. 

Hall said the truck didn’t sustain any damage, but the boat was scratched on its side, and a front window was broken. Responders flipped the boat upright and onto the trailer, and the truck driver towed it away after fixing the flat tire. 

Hall said there was a small fuel spill, but fire personnel cleaned it up with absorbent pads to prevent spillage into the drain system and lake. 

He reminded Sitkans to always properly secure their trailers and boats no matter how short of a distance they plan on traveling. 

Sitkans showed up for the semiquincentennial celebration on Saturday — the 250th birthday of the United States. The annual parade is hosted by the Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce, and this year the event saw high turnout.

In recent years, parade participants in Sitka typically line up Lake Street, and march around the roundabout before turning onto Lincoln Street. But with construction underway near Swan Lake, parade goers lined up on the Sheldon Jackson campus and in front of the Sitka Sound Science Center, marching the full length of the downtown thoroughfare.

View a selection of KCAW’s parade photos here :

A team of experts is working to salvage a Coast Guard helicopter that crashed on Sitka’s Harbor Mountain last month. The U.S. Coast Guard said in a press release that the effort is being led by the Downed Aircraft Recovery Team from the Alaska Army National Guard out of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The group plans to assess the aircraft for its removal, recover the wreckage, and mitigate hazardous materials at the crash site.  

The MH-60 Jayhawk from Air Station Sitka went down on June 22 during a training flight. The crash occurred at about 1,500 feet on the south side of Harbor Mountain. The four crew members involved in the crash were treated for minor injuries and released from Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center the same day. 

The cause of the crash is being investigated by a team of Coast Guard members and civilian experts. They haven’t given a timeline on how long the investigation will take.

The “very hazardous” crash site remains closed by the U.S. Forest Service, and is currently under video surveillance. 

Several trees were damaged in the crash, but there was no reported damage to the local trail or road system. Harbor Mountain Road remains open to pedestrian traffic, but is still closed to vehicles. The Coast Guard said they will encourage the reopening of the road once teams fully assess the site and determine no additional risks remain. 

Crews from Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak remain in Sitka to support operations in Southeast, with the goal of Sitka crews resuming their duties sometime this week. 

More than a hundred Sitkans lined the street in silence on Wednesday, as a procession of police and fire vehicles accompanied a hearse carrying the remains of an unidentified WWII soldier from the police station to the Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport.

The remains of the soldier, known simply as X-3 Fort Randall, were successfully exhumed in late June after nearly eight decades in the Sitka National Cemetery, and are now headed to a Midwest forensics lab for possible identification. Sitka was the third burial site for the unknown soldier, and officials hope to give his remains a final resting place. 

“It was a very successful, respectful, and honorable extraction. We had challenges with X-3, but ultimate success,” said Aaron Cummings, a senior planner with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the U.S. Department of Defense agency in charge of recovering and identifying missing service members from conflicts worldwide.

Cummings has been working as an on-the-ground fixer and coordinator for the Sitka disinterment, along with a team of four others from the DPAA, including an archeologist, an odontologist, a senior recovery expert, and a medic, and representatives from Veterans Affairs and the cemetery.

Cummings used an analogy for how disinterments come about, and the multiple levels of approval they face: He said imagine them like cold cases and the DPAA’s historians and analysts are like detectives who pour over old war records pursuing clues to put a case together, arguing why specific unknown remains should be dug up. 

“In the situation of these disinterments, they were able to put enough pieces together to determine there’s a really good case and a really good likelihood that they’re one of a short list of possible matches,” he said.  

Cummings said hundreds of servicemen from WWII were lost in, or in the waters around, Alaska and were either never found or never identified. In this case, there’s evidence X-3 is an unidentified soldier who was killed in a plane crash near Cold Bay during the Aleutian Campaign in 1942. 

“16 lost, six bodies found, five of those six identified, which leaves us 10 never found,” Cummings said.

A trapper buried six bodies that washed up onshore near his cabin until he could notify authorities, who reburied them in the Fort Randall Post Cemetery in Cold Bay. Five were identified and taken to their respective homes after the war ended. X-3 was transported to Sitka where he remained, unidentified.

Cummings said the DPAA has been looking into this case since 2017, but progress stalled, until a possible family member got involved. 

“We are an agency with finite resources, and there are approximately 81,000 missing [soldiers] from Vietnam, Korea, and World War II,” he said. “With those kind of numbers, it’s hard to prioritize, it’s hard to rack and stack your missions, and family interest is one of the elements that we utilize to determine how we prioritize and which missions move up the ladder.”

While Cummings said all 11 unidentified or missing soldiers are possible matches, Chris Pfeiffer believes X-3 could be his great uncle, 2nd Lt. Eugene Christensen, the co-pilot of the C-53 that went down near Cold Bay. Pfeiffer has collected hundreds of pages about the crash and his uncle over the years, has pressured his congressmen and the DPAA to disinter the remains, and even started a blog to document the process. He flew in from Texas for the disinterment and watched the process unfold from about 50 feet away. 

“Unless I got involved, it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” and so they, ” Pfeiffer said. “They mentioned that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and that’s why we’re here today.”

Pfeiffer said the whole process has been emotional. 

“This is a story that’s been handed down and talked about,” he said. “Lt. Christensen was my mother’s uncle, but he was a surprise baby, and he was just a little older, like nine years from my mother, and she considered him her big brother.”

Pfeiffer said he has a letter from the Army to his great grandfather that says there’s no chance of ever finding his son. He said the Army “closed the door.” 

“But that wasn’t true,” he said. “My great grandparents passed away. My grandparents passed away. My parents passed away, and all of their brothers and sisters all passed away, not knowing what I know. And they could have known it. It could have been shared. Now we know this is the one opportunity. It may not be a good opportunity, but the best one we have to see what happened.”

Cummings said the dig to exhume X-3’s remains was “unique” and “surprising” in many ways. It was the agency’s first disinterment in Sitka. The remains, which were located on a narrow step of the main hill at the national cemetery, had to be hand dug. He said the team also had to make a contraption out of wood to allow the archeologist to hover over the casket on her stomach to access it. Despite the challenges, he said everything was intact. The remains were in a metal casket that was placed inside another one made of wood and metal. 

“Our extremely seasoned archeologist had never seen anything like it,” Cummings said.

There are about 20 gravesites for unknown soldiers in Sitka’s cemetery. Cummings said they also tried to disinter another soldier, known as X-1 Amchitka, during their trip. X-1 is thought to be a crew member from a ship that ran ashore in early 1943. But the team was unable to locate the remains, likely because of soil movement or a previous disinterment decades ago that wasn’t properly recorded. 

Cummings said even when they aren’t successful, these disinterments are important to the nation’s promise, and agency’s mission, to never leave anyone behind. 

“Some of these missions are difficult: The analysis, the historian work is difficult. Sometimes it’s really difficult in the field,” he said. “But it’s important for the closure of the families, and for just anybody to know that we will not lose faith, we will always pursue, we will always try to bring our folks home, provide closure to the families, and just honor our nation’s fallen.”

As for Pfeiffer, he said even if X-3 turns out to not be his great uncle, he’s so grateful to have been involved in this process and will stick with it until the end. 

“I am really thankful, as a veteran myself, to just help whoever this is,” he said. “I’m gonna see it through. If it goes to Oklahoma, goes to California, goes to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arkansas, I’m gonna go with it.”

The remains of X-3 left Sitka on July 1 for Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, where, through DNA analysis, the DPAA hopes to get a positive ID.  

The Sitka School Board is putting a quarter-of-a-million dollars toward new laptops for Sitka High School students. When the board met on Tuesday (6-30-26), it approved the funding unanimously as a three person board, shortly before appointing its two newest members.

The money comes from an additional $1.4 million the district will receive in one-time state funding which was approved by the legislature and signed by the governor late last month.

The district may also receive a windfall of $631,000 in congressional funding earmarked for technology. It would cover a full tech refresh for Kindergarten through 12th grade. But if the federal funding is approved, Superintendent Deidre Jenson said they won’t be able to spend it until October. She said laptops, which would cost less than half of the total, are more urgently needed.

“Our computers for the high school, they are falling apart. The middle school, we can piece together enough from the leftovers from the high school,” Jenson said. “We have a lot of items to purchase for tech, so I would encourage considering purchasing at least $250,000 worth of materials, so we can get it up and rolling right away in the fall.”

The board discussed its options, and considered holding off until the tech funds are secured, so they can spend from that pot of money.

“I wish we could have a conversation about the priorities overall, and where this money fits in. But I realize that tech is important, and it’s not that much money,” board member Courtney Amundson said. “If it’s critical, I mean, I’m persuasive to it, but otherwise, I just think we’re done here, and we need to punt it to next month.”

Board President Phil Burdick said while he’d support the board if it wanted to spend some more time developing a plan for the funds, he worried that pushing it off could have cascading effects. 

“We pushed off the tech refresh two years ago, and we pushed off the tech refresh this year, this past year,” Burdick said. “We’re getting into this same pattern where we don’t have enough information, we don’t have enough money, we have to push this off, we have to push this off. It’s happened to curriculum in every area, it’s now happening to tech.”

Ultimately, the board agreed to approve $250,000 for high school laptops 3-0, with the money coming from the school district’s general fund.