By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
The Sitka School District will continue to work on closing the achievement gap and maintaining solid academics, Superintendent Mary Wegner assured the Sitka Chamber of Commerce Wednesday.
“We will always be worried about closing the achievement gap,” said Wegner, who joined district business manager Cassee Olin in the program at the Chamber’s weekly meeting. “Equity is very important,” Wegner said. “It’s not just that most people learn, but it’s that every student learns.”
Mary Wegner (Sentinel Photo)
Getting into specifics, the superintendent said, “We provide intervention and remediation specifically for that child (who is at risk of falling behind) so they don’t have gaps as they go through the years, that they don’t just sit there and be quiet and don’t cause a problem, but that they’re actually engaging with the content.”
Wegner said that making sure students don’t fall behind is vitally important.
“We’re starting to see some promising practices in closing the achievement gap for our Alaska Native students, specifically in the younger population,” Wegner said.
Sitka schools perform above the Alaska average academically, she said.
The Sitka school district was one of 114 in the country invited to the League of Innovative Schools, Wegner said, explaining that “these are districts which are trying really hard to achieve equity in their educational practices and be innovative in how they approach learning.”
The superintendent spoke of the effect on learning caused by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
“We need to make sure that our students who are experiencing those ACEs have support to work through it because until they do they’re not going to be focusing on the academic, and we are going to have an achievement gap, which is not acceptable.”
In her presentation, Wegner said that there are problems in addition to the achievement gap, such as “the employability skills gap.”
Students have been graduating without the skills employers are looking for, she said, and listed these examples:
“Can you work on a team, can you work on your own, can you identify a problem and then come up with solutions to answer that problem, and then if your first idea doesn’t work can you iterate and come up with a new idea? Can you collaborate?”
School District Business Manager Cassee Olin also spoke, noting that since fiscal year 2017 the district’s budget has fallen from $19.8 million to $19.4 million.
Olin said that about two-thirds of the school district’s budget is based on state funding, with the remaining third coming from local sources. Less than one percent, she said, is federal. Trusts and charitable foundations provide about $6 million on top of the $19.4 million, she said. Some of the major beneficiaries include the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, the Supporting Transitions and Educational Promise (STEPS) Grant, and Americorps.
The $6 million in additional funding brings the school district’s total to about $25 million for the year.
“Without this $6 million we would not have the staffing to do the work that we need to do in trauma-informed and social-emotional learning, and really preparing our students for success in their lives,” Wegner said.
“We have dropped roughly about $400,000 (in expenses) due to staff layoffs, a reduction in health insurance premiums, and cuts that we’ve taken, efficiencies that we’ve done,” Olin said.
In August, the School Board approved $152,000 worth of budget cuts.
Going forward, Wegner concluded, the school district’s goal will be to keep striving “not only for health in learning, but health in life.”
