Rural Alaska blog: The Village : (UPDATED) School must choose between paying bills, paying teachers, superintendent says

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Kyle Hopkins

I was born in Sitka, have lived in Kake, Skagway and Fairbanks and joined the ADN in 2005 after writing for the Anchorage Press and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. I started blogging for the paper in 2006 with The Trail, our blog about the governor's race. Then came the Alaska Politics blog. Now I'm covering government and rural affairs and live in Anchorage with my wife, Rebecca. (Update: Our daughter Alice was born May 31. Thanks everyone for the suggestions.) E-mail me at khopkins@adn.com and find me on Twitter at twitter.com/ADNVillage.

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Rural blog: The Village

(UPDATED) School must choose between paying bills, paying teachers, superintendent says

Posted by thevillage

Posted: March 17, 2009 - 12:37 pm

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The Tanana school district is $200,000 in the hole and needs an injection of cash or faces a tough choice: Stop paying the bills, or stop paying teachers.

That’s the message this week from Tanana City School District Superintendent John Bania. Click here to read his description of the problem.

Gov. Sarah Palin’s rural adviser, John Moller, plans to visit the village on Friday, according to the letter.

Bania hopes Moller will then plead the school’s case to the Legislature.

To save money, the school has cut employees' hours – sometimes by half – and canceled some athletic travel such as basketball trips, Bania said.

UPDATE: Real quick -- I wanted to post a little more about how Tanana is shrinking. The school enrollment is down from 104 in 1998 to 39 students this year, according to the state Department of Education.

Meantime the town's population has gone from 308 in 2000 to 252 last year, based on Department of Labor numbers.

I asked Charlie Wright, the local water plant operator what's going on.

“It’s shrinking because of a lack of jobs and a lack of housing. And the cost of living, the cost of fuel is chasing people away. It’s outrageous," he said.

Young people are leaving the village. “As they get old enough, there aint nothing here for them. They either got to leave for school or work.”

Bania says he came to work for the district in August and found a $250,000 shortfall, a stack of unpaid invoices and "financial chaos." An insurance payment, from a fire in the school’s teacher housing, shrank the budget gap to $200,000.

(To put that figure in perspective, the tiny school district's budget for the coming year is a little over $1 million.)

The budget crunch comes from a slew of factors, Bania says. Some, like high fuel and electricity costs, were problems this year for rural schools across the state. Others are more specific to Tanana. According to Bania’s letter, some of the problems are:

-- A 30 percent drop in enrollment in district's single K-12 school, which started the year with 39 students.
-- Unpaid bills.
-- Despite added expenses, the school didn’t make any staffing cuts and chose an “exorbitant” health insurance plan for employees.

Bania writes: “The Tanana City School District has managed to stay within this year’s budget, but circumstances outlined above from previous years have severely impacted this district.

"The Tanana School District board members frequently requested financial information from the previous administration, but their requests went unanswered. They have learned a hard lesson and will be much more diligent and forceful in the future. This problem actually began festering three or four years ago, but went unnoticed or was ignored.”