The Sitka School Board is back to full capacity. When the board met on Tuesday (6-30-26), two new members were sworn in to fill vacant seats.

Kat Richards and Matthew Potter were the only applicants for two Sitka School Board seats that opened in May, when former board members Amanda Williams and Tom Williams stepped down [link]. After a month-long application period, the board announced Richards’ and Potters’ candidacy on June 23, giving the public a week to weigh in on their potential appointments. 

At a special meeting on June 30, the board interviewed them both. Richards works in healthcare and owns her own business. She recently accepted a job with the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium as a nurse educator, leaving her job as the district’s school nurse. She said her experience in that  role familiarized her with the school’s challenges, and would inform her work on the board. And it’s not the first time she’s sought a seat, and she’s looking to get involved.

“This is definitely community focused. I mean, there’s not much more community focused than with our youth, and so I think that is really why I’m doing it,” Richards told the board.

Potter is an educator and administrator who has worked in Sitka and schools around the state. He said he and his family are moving back to Sitka this summer.

“I think that will kind of…help me be able to have a different perspective,” he said of his experience in education. “But like I said, it really, it all comes down to, I want my kids to have the best school, the best district possible.”

When asked what he’d like to change about the district, Potter said he’d like to see a “coherent overall plan” and communicate that plan with the community. 

“I don’t think that we’re just going to see the increases of, you know, 20 or 30 or 40% in our school district budgets coming in anytime soon. So kind of acknowledging that this is the new normal, and figuring out how we can work within it,” he said. “But have a plan, knowing that this is what it’s going to look like for the foreseeable future.”

Richards also said she thinks the board could work on its action planning for the future, but values its transparency. 

“I really feel that the community members, the students…that they have a say in it,” she said. “They have the ability to reach out and be part of the process, and I think that’s a very big strength.”

After interviewing the candidates, the board voted unanimously to appoint them to the vacant seats. Both candidates were sworn in over Zoom. They will serve on the board until the municipal election in October. 

Ellie Schmidt and a few of her friends were camping at Fred’s Creek Cabin on Kruzof Island in early June. On a rainy Saturday morning at low tide, they took a walk on the beach…

“And we came across a weird object, which I thought was part of a boat,” Schmidt said. “[My friend] thought maybe it was a very weirdly colored log. It was very white and gleaming.” 

As they got closer, they realized it was a whale. Closer still, a very unusual one.

“It was the weirdest whale I’ve ever seen,” Schmidt said. “It had the shape of a dolphin, but it was so much bigger than a dolphin, and it was really striking.”

The whale was about 20 feet long. But it wasn’t just one. Schmidt said they also saw a fetus protruding from the adult whale’s body. They identified them as goose-beaked whales, a deep-sea species rarely seen in Southeast Alaska.

They tied the mother up on the beach, anchoring her body to drifted logs, and they called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s regional marine mammal stranding network coordinators, who asked them to remove the fetus and take it back to Sitka on their eight-foot dinghy. 

“So we basically found whatever gloves we had around, whatever sharp things we had around, and then carefully cut open the whale, and then put this beautiful whale fetus into a cooler,” Schmidt said. “We estimated it was 150 pounds, around six feet long, and very beautiful. We put the cooler in the boat, and brought it back to town.”

Lauren Wild, a whale biologist and assistant applied fisheries professor at University of Alaska Southeast, met them at the dock, put the whale fetus into a white body bag, and put it in the freezer at the local university campus. 

“And then it sort of became, ‘Should we go out and do a necropsy on the mom? Is there information we can find out?’” Wild said.  

Goose-beaked whales are found in deep offshore waters in most oceans and seas worldwide, but their migration patterns still aren’t known. They’re the deepest and longest-diving mammal in the world, capable of diving at least 3,300 feet for 20 to 40 minutes to feed on cephalopods like squid and octopus. The deepest known dive for a goose-beaked whale was nearly 2 miles and the longest known dive lasted 222 minutes, according to NOAA.

“It’s sort of a very unusual thing for a beaked whale to wash up, because they live offshore and they’re deep divers,” Wild said. “So for it to have somehow floated in, the currents must be quite interesting there for it to have gotten into that cove.”

Beaked whales use echolocation for navigation and foraging, and are particularly sensitive to underwater sounds. 

“They’re typically the species of whale that is associated with Navy sonar,” Wild said. “So when you hear about mass strandings, often those have been beaked whales.”

The Kruzof stranding wasn’t the only one this summer. A second beaked whale was found beached in Yakutat in early June. Wild said this is rare. Previously, only two were reported in the area in the past 40 years.

“It would be great to see it alive, but it’s cool to [have] a specimen wash up dead, because you can kind of poke into it a little bit more and learn more about it,” Wild said.  

Wild put a small response team together and returned to the stranding site two days later to perform a partial necropsy, or animal autopsy, on the mother. She said they were able to retrieve the head, get skin and blubber samples for genetics and hormone testing, and fecal samples to test for harmful algal blooms. They also looked in the whale’s stomach, which was full of squid beaks, meaning she likely didn’t starve to death.  

“We weren’t able to definitively say what the cause of death was, unfortunately,” Wild said. “Because the carcass was in kind of a moderate decomposition stage, we weren’t really able to get all the things that we would want to get that might help us understand cause of death.”

Wild said if the whale had been more intact, they would have investigated the whale’s brain to look for signs of barotrauma, widely known as “the bends,” from coming back up to the surface too quickly. They also would have wanted to look at her bones, blubber, and muscle for any signs of blunt force trauma that could have contributed to her death. 

“Every piece of a whale is a puzzle piece to sort of put together what its life looked like,” Wild said. “I can’t say right now that we will never know [the cause of death], but we’ll see.”

They brought the whale’s head back to town with them to freeze and use for education purposes in the future. Wild said while she had hoped they could retrieve more, she’s grateful they got the opportunity to do the necropsy at all. 

“Beaked whales are so poorly understood — exactly what they’re doing and what they’re eating, and all the different life history parameters that are so difficult to study on these really seldom seen offshore deep diving species,” she said. “So I mostly just think it’s a cool experience to be able to have been able to get what we did.”

Wild said they scanned the fetus at the local hospital on June 25. And she said they plan to perform a public necropsy on the fetus at Sitka Whalefest this fall, which could shed light on what caused them to wash ashore on a remote Southeast Alaska island. 

After Saturday’s parade, Sitkans can continue the party on the water with the Sitka Maritime Heritage Society’s annual Fourth of July Cruise. Organizers joined KCAW for the Morning Interview to discuss the cruise, which will feature naturalist Matt Goff and historian Rebecca Poulson. Listen to the conversation here.

Piles of white plastic sacks line both sides of a small gravel lot in Sitka’s Gary Paxton Industrial Park. There’s around 90 of these bags, each about the size of a washing machine, stuffed with marine debris.

“I’m not sure what these buoys are for,” says Zofia Danielson as she picks up a bundle of oblong buoys resting near one pile’s base. Their red plastic has faded into a translucent orange from salt and the sun. “In the last two years, Sitkans have been finding them all across the sound.”

Danielson is the Sitka Sound Science Center’s managing scientist. She oversees the marine debris program that’s been gathering scraps along the coastline for the past year and a half. This summer, the team made a puzzling discovery at Inner Point on Kruzof Island.

“I imagine somebody scribbled it out and dropped it in the ocean as a reflection of how they were feeling at the time,” she says.

An ambiguous seven-line poem sprawls across a small piece of lined paper. It’s rolled up inside a glass bottle dotted with algae and sealed with a plastic cork.

“We all love to wax poetic about the ocean, about her many currents and storms, and I think truly the perfect storm brought the message in a bottle to Inner Point.”

Danielson says the crew isn’t sure where it came from or how long ago it was written. She says finding a message in a bottle is actually pretty common. But this one is a bit more cryptic than others they’ve stumbled upon in the past.

“Sometimes they have more of a story,” she says, “and sometimes they’re a little more of a mystery.”

And she’s leaving the contents of the poem a mystery too.

“It’s a message for the person and the sea,” Danielson says.

They found the bottle nestled in a stack of driftwood logs.

“It’s always a lucky find when you find something fragile in such a rugged landscape.”

Danielson says the wind, waves, and currents along the outer coast are the perfect recipe for marine debris to accumulate on the shore. They plan to go out on a total of 35 cleanup days this summer. When they do, a crew of four travels an hour or two from Sitka on a small vessel, then rows into shore on a dinghy.

“They crawl through the jungle gym of alder trees up in the high intertidal and wade through the dense beachgrass and cow parsnip to pick up plastic bottles and other smaller pieces of debris that can be hidden by the summer’s vegetation,” she says.

After several hours on shore, the team passes the debris in an assembly line onto the dinghy to take back to the boat. Once in Sitka, the collection is driven out to the lot at the industrial park to be weighed and documented.

The science center has a statewide database for marine debris cleanup efforts dating back to the early 2000s.

“Marine debris is an incredibly powerful tool for communication,” Danielson says.

With their findings, they can learn more about where debris washes up, how much accumulates over time, and the impact it has on intertidal plants and animals. Whether it’s a message in a bottle or a fishing net, Danielson says every piece of debris has a story to tell.

View the full agenda here

The Sitka School Board will meet on June 30 at 5 p.m. in the district office board room to interview the candidates and vote on their appointments. The board will also take up the agenda from its regular meeting earlier this month, which was postponed. 

More than 100 Sitkans decorated in rainbows and holding signs that read “Love is a terrible thing to hate” and “Protect Queer Kids,” gathered in Totem Square on Saturday for the culmination of Pride Month. 

The event was put on by Sitka Pride, which aims to build equity and respect for LGBTQ2+ people in Sitka through accessible programming and inclusive events year round. 

Quinlyn Holder, who is Yup’ik, Athabaskan, and white, is a Sitka Pride organizer. They told the gathered crowd that growing up in Sitka, they felt like they had to move away because they were queer.

“I felt like I could feel how different I was, and I went east,” Holder said. “But I came back because I was Native. There was something that I had to do here. I had to come home. I couldn’t run anymore. And every time I came home, I realized that there were a lot, and lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of queer people here. We have always been here.”

Michael Mausbach helped start the current iteration of Sitka Pride. They began their speech by asking the crowd to look around at the people standing beside them — “at the families, the friends, the neighbors,” “at the kids waving flags,” “at the elders, queer and allied,” — and reminded them of the importance of community. 

“Today, I hope we honor the people who came before us: those who struggled, organized, celebrated, resisted, and imagined a future they might never get to see, because we owe them so much,” Mausbach said. “But I also hope that we honor something that’s easier to overlook. It’s the people walking beside us. Because these are the people we’ll call tomorrow. These are the people we’ll laugh with next week, we’ll dance with tonight at the Mean Queen. These are the people that we’ll grieve with, celebrate with, cook with, create with, and keep building this place together.”

Following the speeches, the marchers headed up Lincoln St. led by people carrying the American, Alaska, and Pride flags, before walking back to Totem Square accompanied by a police vehicle escort. 

Steve Bethune, wildlife management biologist from ADF&G, joins KCAW for the Morning Interview to share best practices regarding bear activity this year in Sitka. Bethune oversees bears, deer, mountain goats, moose, and more on Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands. Listen to the conversation here: