Extracurricular Activities
Dear Editor: Participation in extracurricular student activities can be life-changing for students. It was for me, as a student who struggled in school. The course of my entire life changed in a profound and positive way when I joined the Palmer High School swim team as a sophomore. To this day, decades later, swimming is still an important part of my life, from which I continue to benefit.
Extracurricular student activities are important to students in the Sitka School District, too, and a significant portion of SSD’s student population participates:
• Six out of 10 Sitka High School students participated in an extracurricular activity last school year.
• There are 15 activities offered at Sitka High School. The largest sports and activity teams are track and field; music festival groups; baseball; and drama, debate, and forensics (six-time state champs!).
• In just the month since school has started, Blatchley Middle School already has 120 students participating in an afterschool sport or activity.
If a “dedicated municipal fund for the Sitka School District for extracurricular student activities and associated travel costs” were established, per Proposition 1, the following might be some uses of that dedicated fund:
• Support the Student Activity Scholarship Fund to assist families with activities participation fee(s) and other costs associated with participation in student activities. Eligibility for the scholarship fund could be established through the already existing free and reduced-priced meal application process. In other words, students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals could automatically be eligible for the Student Activity Scholarship Fund. Currently, 32% of high school students in SSD qualify for free and reduced-priced meals, but during the 2021-22 school year, 19% of students participating in extracurricular activities qualified for free or reduced-priced meals. A scholarship fund would expand opportunities for participation.
• Reduce student activity participation costs by capping activities participation fees to one yearly fee, rather than a per-activity fee. Currently, students pay a fee for each activity (from $200-$400 per activity). This change to a yearly fee, from a per-activity fee, would expand opportunities for students to participate in multiple activities.
• In conjunction with fundraising, support teams’ regular season student activity travel, travel for students who qualify for Regional and State events, and travel for students who qualify for free and reduced-priced meals.
• Support non-athletic activities participation at the middle- and elementary-school levels (e.g., Battle of the Books, Spelling and Geography Bees, music festival).
• Other ideas as suggested by parents, community members, and staff through public listening sessions and an advisory committee.
The District would hold public listening sessions on this topic, like we do every year during our budget process. The District would also establish a Student Activity Fund Advisory Committee of students, parents, community members and partners, and staff to provide regular input on the fund.
A Student Activity Scholarship Fund would align with the District’s strategic plan (“expand opportunities to remove participation barriers for students”), which was developed in a communitywide process.
We are proud of our record of academic achievement in the Sitka School District, as well as the breadth and successes of our extracurricular activities and offerings. Thank you to the Assembly and also to the countless businesses and community members who donate both money and hours to support our students and youth sports and activities in Sitka.
The Sitka School District is excited to be working with the City and Borough of Sitka on the new Community Recreations program (“Community Schools”), which is already funded and underway.
If you have questions about student activities in the Sitka School District, please don’t hesitate to ask Activities Director Rich Krupa, your school principal, or me.
Frank Hauser, Superintendent,
Sitka School District
Elections
Dear Editor: The gift of this paper that the Poulson family gave freely to Sikans for over two years was essential for us to navigate through the pandemic. When Thad gave us a heads-up about a well-earned retirement in his future which might end the Sitka Sentinel publication, I quickly paid our subscription and bought another yearlong one for family. The Sitka Sentinel should have a yearly fund-raising drive just like Raven Radio does because it is just as essential as Raven Radio is to our region. A heartfelt thank you goes out to all the Sitka Sentinel staff for all you do every day to make this newspaper happen for us!
When I saw Mary Peltola’s picture on the front page of the paper declaring her win, it just made me so happy! I looked at that picture and thought, “I can’t believe it, we actually elected the first Alaska Native into the United States House of Representatives!”
Look at her picture, no makeup, no fake smile, but a “real person” who is a fish camp mama that is going to fight for her fish! It just gives me hope that Alaskans CAN elect genuine people that will honestly lead us in our struggle for food sustainability and the dangers that climate is bringing! Gunalcheesh to everyone who voted for her! It feels like a turning point.
Now Southeast Alaskans have another opportunity to elect another “real” person in Rebecca Himschoot into our state House of Representatives. After Dunleavy has taken our Alaska education system to the chopping block and torn down what it took us years to build, then it makes total sense to elect an educator to represent us. But Himschoot is not just any educator, she is a science educator that understands food webs, climate change, salmon runs and the importance in growing children that are science “thinkers” from the ground up.
The worst blow to our Sitka School District recently has been the loss of the science position at Keet Gooshi Heen! That position defined our district as a leader in the state in science education. While other districts start science education at middle school level, Sitka understood science is not a subject of facts, but it is a “way of thinking” and you must develop that at a young age.
For years we have had elementary age students who got to devote a block of time to do science labs, experiential science activities, science project fairs, and EXPERIENCE science. Cutting that position was a bad, bad, bad decision that evidently the School Board felt they had to make due to the Dunleavy education budget cuts. Since Himschoot not only held that science position at Keet, but built the curriculum and handed it off to Buxton who continued to build and refine it, then I know how hard Himschoot will fight for the funding to enable the School Board to reinstate it!
All of Alaska’s children deserve good teachers who stay because they can afford to live here and retire here. In Sitka we grow our teachers. Every Sitka teacher that grew up here and chose to teach here is a jewel in our crown of educators. But when we have homegrown teachers that have to move out of state to teach because of lack of salary and retirement due to legislative cuts, then it makes sense to elect a seasoned educator that you know personally will fight for the education our children deserve. I can depend that Rebecca Himschoot will fight for education, fish and ferries.
I hope we are on a roll and we are going to elect another “real” person to the Alaska House of Representatives that we can trust to be there for our family’s future. I would like to say gunalcheesh to Rebecca for running for this office, you were a gift to our students, our community, and now you will be able to help us at the state level!
Also I would like to thank Thor Christianson for running for Assembly again. He gets Sitka. He gets the educational needs of our Sitka students and he gets the immediate needs of our hard working fisherman!
Patty Dick, Sitka
Boatyard Support
Dear Editor: I was in Wrangell recently, where another person in the lodging where I was staying had been there a month, with his family, doing major work on their steel fishing boat at the Wrangell boatyard. He was happy with the work he was getting done, which was mostly metal work but also engine work since he was hauled out anyway.
This was just one job, and I could see the boatyard is large and busy. Not having a haulout in Sitka is costing us literally millions of dollars, just in work on our own fleet, not to mention the boats from outside Sitka who might want or need a haulout here.
In addition to the sales tax, and the lodging, food and services, the kind of jobs a boatyard supports are good jobs, small businesses of skilled tradespersons and artisans. It also helps a vessel owner decide to keep their boat in Sitka year-round. Boats are part of our culture as well as our economy: in 1900, Sitka still had professional canoe builders, as well as shipwrights and boatbuilders. Once the commercial fisheries took off in the 1910s, hundreds of wood boats were built in Sitka (the vast majority by Native craftsmen), and boat building and repair continue to be a robust, if overlooked, segment of our town’s culture and economy.
Another bit of history is how over the past century Sitka has invested in hydropower, water, and harbors as part of supporting a diverse, healthy community and economy.
A publicly-owned haulout has plenty of precedent on this coast, such as the Port of Port Townsend, and is an investment that generates many times its value in economic activity. This is something we have always taken for granted when we had the haulout at Allen Marine and later at Halibut Point Marine.
It is unfortunate that we are without a boatyard, and the longer we are without one, the more damage we do to the marine services businesses, and to the fleet itself, by making it hard to do maintenance and repairs. But we now have the opportunity to get one again, by voting Yes on Proposition 2 Oct. 4. This is an extremely positive step for our community and our economy.
Rebecca Poulson, Sitka
City Election Picks
Dear Editor: I have been hemming and hawing about writing my two bits on our upcoming election. I decided to just do it.
I will vote for Steven Eisenbeisz for mayor. I don’t always agree with him, but he has a steady hand, he listens, and will do a darn good job. My two picks for Assembly are Thor Christianson and Chris Ystad. Don’t forget to vote. Thank you.
Jeff Budd, Sitka
Proposition 2
Dear Editor: Some caution might be warranted in a “Yes” vote for this ballot measure.
Sitka’s now-defunct shipyard and repair facility was privately owned and operated, and its reason(s) for closing seem to have been varied. It seems telling that no commercial business entity expressed interest in the RFP floated by the city and borough. What might be the reasons for such reluctance?
A possibility might lie with both fuel and moorage costs rising out to the foreseeable horizon in Sitka, in conjunction with the extreme variability of resource availability to the various fisheries in which Sitkans participate. Bad patches for fishers over time could result in unpaid obligations to the city and borough for shipyard services rendered – successive such misfortunes for fishers could create uncollected or even uncollectible receivables. This would necessitate aggressive collection efforts for Sitka taxpayers to recoup their exposure. Would there be will in city administration to undertake these efforts? How successful would they be in making Sitka taxpayers whole?
That is a reasonable question, that follows from a cautionary tale. In the years leading up to the demise of our community hospital, the facility was carrying year-over-year about $1M in what administration euphemized as “charity care” – a polite way of saying unpaid bills. We recall that in those years hospital administration was in front of the Assembly asking for financial assistance, no doubt at least in part to cover what accountants call “allowance for doubtful accounts.” The point here is that in all of those years no serious efforts by the hospital were undertaken to collect those owed monies. Simply posed, will the same situation present with a city and borough-owned shipyard?
The City of Wrangell owns and operates the sort of facility contemplated by Ballot Measure 2. It might behoove city horsepower to determine how Wrangell is faring with the receivables from its own operation.
Charles Dean, Sitka
