City, School District Compile Project List

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Category: News

Created on Wednesday, 22 January 2025 15:44

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    School Board members and city staff pored over a long list of needed capital improvements in district school buildings at the board’s Jan. 8 meeting.
    The district and the city, which is in charge of capital improvements on school buildings, are working together to prioritize needs, Superintendent Deidre Jenson said.
    “The positive thing is that they found those two lists (one from the city and another from the district) do really kind of mesh well together and support each other,” Jenson said.
    The city maintenance department assessed the condition of all district buildings, and the only item listed as urgent was a window repair at Sitka High School, the School Board was told.
    “Failed seals, fogged panes and faulty emergency egress were noted during condition assessments. Replacement exterior units… would be ideal,” the board’s CIP packet states.
    The estimated cost for the window repairs was listed at $50,000, far lower than the projected cost of other items, such as a high priority restoration of the Sitka High School roof, listed at $2.5 million.
    Amy Ainslie, the city’s acting public works director, told the board the city is going through school buildings as it would any other city infrastructure. The city took on school district building maintenance costs last year to ease stress on the district’s education budget.
    “The really strong benefits of doing it this way is that we are focusing on reducing the most risk and addressing our most urgent needs in at least a way that’s as objective and systematic as possible. There’s always different room for interpretation, and that’s a very healthy conversation to have,” Ainslie said.
    Board member Tom Williams questioned the city’s estimates for repairing the windows.
    “The numbers on those spreadsheets are suspect to me; they’re too round,” Williams said. “They’re $50,000 for windows… Are they estimates, or have they been researched and there’s confidence that those project costs are what’s reflected on the spreadsheets?”
    Ainslie replied that the costs are indeed estimates, as projects will need to be put out to bid before construction occurs, but the estimates “are informed by similar projects that we have done.”
    Other projects on the list included improvements at the Xoots Elementary playground, roof work at Blatchley Middle School, and upgrades at the Performing Arts Center. Itemized projects number in the dozens, and a full list is available on the school district website.
    Each project on the list includes a projected end date, but city maintenance superintendent Connor Dunlap advised the board not to take those dates into consideration.
    “At the time that this was put together, I was basically going under the assumption of, if the money showed up today, when could we start this project? When could we end it? So it was really more of a window of how long we think that project would take,” Dunlap said.
    Jenson said she expects the list of capital projects to come before the board again in the future.
    Before things go out to bid, “there’s a lot of steps before that, before we are ready to push the button on that project,” she said. “And then if we start on that project, then there’s the approval of the CIP list by the state... I think we’d be going through this cycle again, and it’d be coming before (the board) again, next January, before those adjustments would be made.”
    The School Board voted unanimously to approve the CIP list, which was the only item of new business on the agenda.
    In her report to the board on the possibility of a charter school in town, Jenson stated that the number of kids in Sitka not already attending district schools is likely lower than previously believed.
    “I had mentioned last meeting, or two meetings ago… that there were approximately 200 students that maybe are home schooled in Sitka. I found a more accurate number, which is 44 students that have a Sitka Zip code that are registered with another school,” she said. “So they live in Sitka, but they’re registered with another school. There are more students that might be in a private school or other home schools that’s not through a correspondent school that gets state funding.”
    Turning to the upcoming budget process, board member Phil Burdick noted that Congress recently failed to reauthorize the Secure Rural Schools Act, which could possibly throw an additional fiscal hurdle at a district already facing a seven-digit shortfall for the coming year.
    The U.S. House “missed the deadline to renew the Secure Rural Schools Act, so there is a plan to reintroduce it in the new Congress, but there are no guarantees that that will pass,” Burdick said. “The Senate did pass it; it just died in the House, no guarantees but certainly a delay in those funds, and that has been a $300,000 pass-through from the city.”
    The board plans to deliver its request for funding to the city in February, he said.
    The board heard a report from the school district’s AmeriCorps coordinator, Sarah Laurie, who said the volunteers have provided tens of thousands of hours of service around the community. In the 2023-2024 school year, Laurie said, AmeriCorps volunteers provided about 22,100 hours of service, largely in Sitka schools but in other venues, too, and helped around 800 people.
    “AmeriCorps members are pretty integral to organizational success in a lot of organizations across Sitka,” she said.
     “I do have really good member retention. So if I get them here, they tend to stay and they tend to be pretty satisfied… Stable summer housing would be so great to find and then just continue to build on what has worked for me,” Laurie said.
    Jenson praised Laurie and her volunteers for their efforts.
    “She is phenomenal,” the superintendent said, “and she’s the person that’s behind the scenes that you don’t always see all the time, but she just meshes that group of people and takes care of them so that they can do what they need to do with the kids. She does an amazing job.”