Support Schools
Dear Editor: As our community makes decisions on what to fund and how to fund it, we’d like to share some information on the relationship between school funding, students’ lives and Sitka’s long-term viability.
To begin with, our school district is in a deficit situation, with decreased funding from other sources.
Small class size (20 or fewer) in elementary school is definitively linked to students graduating and being successful when they leave school. Right now Sitka’s elementary classrooms are right on this edge. Fewer teachers, and larger class sizes, will mean more students will struggle through their school career, and more will drop out. Dropping out of high school makes it much harder to succeed in life.
In middle and high school, loss of teachers means loss of classes, even programs. If certain classes are not available students can’t qualify for the Alaska Performance Scholarship, and it makes it harder for our students to get into competitive colleges and technical schools.
Education is one of the primary responsibilities of local government. Cuts to school funding will have a detrimental impact on the education our students receive. And, it will make teaching harder, and you will have a harder time finding good teachers to hire; when you start losing quality, it is not something you can bring back overnight. Cuts to schools now have a long-term impact.
Cutting funding to schools will be detrimental to Sitka’s economic future: school quality has a lot of weight when young professionals look at relocating. If you don’t have good schools, it makes it harder to recruit the best applicants, whether in the public or private sector. We need more young families to move to and stay in Sitka, and already the scarcity of quality, affordable housing and the high cost of living put us at a disadvantage.
If we let the quality of our schools go down, we are giving up on being attractive to young families, and going farther in the direction of a retirement/summer community, which is very bad news for long-term viability.
As we discuss and weigh our priorities and the fairest way to raise revenue, we are hopeful that we make our schools a priority for the future of the kids (who only have one chance at this!) and for the future of Sitka. Thank you.
Rebecca Poulson, Eric Dow, Sitka
Clean Energy
Dear Editor: Clean energy for Sitka – let’s go 100 percent.
Popular science is full of tag lines like “the planet will warm up 1-2 degrees by year 2100,” or “sea level will rise a few feet,” and complicated scientific models have been developed to predict the future course of climate change. While no one can accurately predict the future, it seems that these estimates could be way off base.
Rather, it seems clear that the planet is changing much faster than most scientists are predicting- for example, on Christmas Day, east-coast temperatures were close to 40 degrees warmer than normal (not just 1-2 degrees). Even last week, temperatures in large portions of the upper Midwest were 15-20 degrees warmer than normal.
And arctic sea ice is melting much faster than models originally predicted. Global CO2 levels have recently surpassed 400 parts per million (well in excess of the 350 level that scientists recommend); and each year CO2 levels are rising close to 2 parts per million higher (EPA 2016) as long as fossil fuels remain in such high use.
Here in Sitka we have an amazing opportunity to use power from the Blue Lake expansion to create a model “green city.” By using a portion of the 30 billion watt-hours of “new electricity” generated each year, we have the potential for an entire community of electric vehicles (roughly 5,000 cars), for also converting many homes to electric heat, and still having electricity left over for a reasonable level of economic growth. An “all-renewable” Sitka could become a world leader for cities its size since both home heating and transportation could be powered primarily by clean hydropower.
Please visit www.go100percent.org for more information on what countries and communities around the globe are doing to reduce their environmental footprints. For example, Denmark is projected to be one of the first nations to be entirely fossil-free for its electrical generation (using primarily wind power instead). And Norway hopes to be selling only electric vehicles by 2025 (with no gasoline cars). Here in the U.S., California has set ambitious goals of reaching 33 percent renewable energy by 2020.
If these messages resonate with you please make your voices known to city and state leaders that you are passionate about transitioning Sitka off of fossil fuels in a realistic timeframe. Let’s encourage and enable our community to become part of the www.go100percent.org movement.
Dave Nicholls, Sitka
