By KLAS STOLPE
Sitka Sentinel Staff
What would you do if you had to fix your school budget?
That’s the question the Sitka School Board is posing to the general public in their proposed 2019-20 (fiscal year 2020) Budget Survey.
The survey was discussed at Wednesday’s board meeting in the high school library.
School Board president Jennifer McNichol said she came up with the online survey idea two weeks ago when she was walking her dog.
“As we have heard we are not going to have a surplus of a budget this year, so once again we’re going to be faced with difficult choices,” McNichol said Wednesday. “We’re just trying to provide another avenue for people to provide input. Not everybody is comfortable or has the time in their lives to come to budget work sessions or hearings and speak to us, not everybody likes to send emails or call us up or stop us on the street.”
McNichol said that typical budget hearings can be dominated by organized groups promoting their special educational concerns.
“That’s great,” McNichol said. “But we all know lots of people care about lots of other things, too. It’s just that one group is more organized or comfortable than another in testifying in public.”
The board plans to place its survey on the front page of the school district website, and offer other sites to link to it.
Members reviewed a rough draft of the questions, and agreed the form needed an additional section for general comments.
“It will be up on the site really soon,” McNichol said today. “It’s for anybody. We would like as much participation as possible because everybody cares – it would be nice to hear from everybody. We want there to be options for everybody and their thoughts.”
In the New Business portion of the meeting the board gave final approval to the 2019-20 School Calendar with no overall changes from the draft proposal.
The calendar was the major change last year and has proven to be popular with students and parents primarily because it ends the first semester before the longer Christmas holiday break and starts the second semester afterward.
“It certainly seems to be well appreciated by the students and the families,” McNichol said. “Next year’s is going to be quite similar. We’re trying to lock in some consistencies for families so they can have a more predictable year-to-year.”
The board also approved travel for the Sitka High School Model United Nations Team.
Team coach Owen Fulton, a 2015 SHS grad, spoke to the board.
Fulton has been attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks working on secondary education and history degree and is currently completing a year-long student teaching internship at Sitka High School as part of that program. He’s working under Howard Wayne, teaching in his American Government and Alaska Studies classes.
Fulton said the Model United Nations Program introduces middle, high school and college students to international diplomacy by having them represent different countries from around the world in simulations of United Nations committees.
Fulton will be taking four Sitka students to Anchorage at the end of February.
“They will represent the Ivory Coast in four different simulated committees,” Fulton said. “The United Nations Security Council, the World Health Organization, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the UN Industrial Development Organization.”
He said the students research those issues and learn how the Ivory Coast and other countries deal with them, as well as more specific topics within their selected country.
“And in Anchorage the students will be speaking with other students from around the state, both high school and college students, talking about different solutions to the problems they identify in the international realm,” Fulton said. “And voting on those solutions, so at the end of the conference we will come back to Sitka with some resolutions that they have helped pass or have written themselves and will end up with a really great experience, not only in international diplomacy but also in public speaking, in working with others, in consensus building and identifying solutions to these really larger-than-life problems that we see in the international community.”
The board noted that the students aren’t receiving school funding and said they could help with expenses by placing a link to their team’s GoFundMe.com account on the Sitka High facebook. That fundraising account can also be found by googling Owen Fulton.
