SITKA, ALASKA
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The idea is still in its infancy, but judging by the interest shown at a meeting on campus last Tuesday, it may have more traction locally than the failed merger with the University of Dubuque.
About forty people, representing a diverse group of organizations involved in everything from the education to behavioral health, showed up for a briefing with the college’s manager, John Holst, and Alaska Arts Southeast director Roger Schmidt.
Earlier this month (on October 14), top state officials from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Alaska Mental Health Trust, and the departments of Health and Social Services, Labor, and Education and Early Development had met privately at the college to discuss the potential for partnerships at Sheldon Jackson. Holst said the upshot of that meeting was that, while the state did not want to purchase or take over the campus, there was the potential to locate programs there, ranging from behavioral health services, to workforce development in the trades and fisheries, to Native teacher training. The state, in other words, would follow, but not lead.
The school remains about $4.7-million dollars in debt, with several major sales pending, such as the Stratton Library, which will be added to the state-owned Sheldon Jackson Museum as an archive. Trustee Gary Paxton said during Tuesday’s briefing that clearing all the college’s debt remains a major hurdle, but once finished, the core campus could be handed over to another entity.
Speaking after the meeting, Roger Schmidt described how the fine arts camp, currently housed at Mt. Edgecumbe High School, emerged as that “entity.”
“You know there wasn’t anybody else out there saying ‘We want to take this on.’ So I just looked at it as a problem for our organization. We want to have a home here, how can we solve this problem? And Gary Paxton suggested ‘You’re an educational entity, you’re a non-profit, you serve Alaska Natives, you serve the state, and you’re in partnership with the Sitka Summer Music Festival and the science consortium. Those are great core partners to begin with. I feel like there are things we could do.”
Schmidt has prepared a ten-page “vision and planning” document for the transformation of the Sheldon Jackson campus into a “Community Campus for the Arts, Sciences, Culture, and Humanities.” It outlines a basic partnership between the fine arts camp, the Sitka Summer Music Festival, the Sitka Cultural Center, and the Sitka Sound Science Center. The four organizations would rebrand their summer activities under the umbrella title, “The Sitka Summer Festival.”
The Sitka Summer Music Festival is in its fortieth season. It has already purchased one of the campus buildings as a rehearsal hall, offices, and housing for visiting musicians. The Sitka Sound Science Center is in the process of acquiring the former Sheldon Jackson Hatchery and aquarium. The science center is the only non-profit to emerge totally new from the ruin of the college.
Schmidt says the center’s energetic new director, Lisa Busch, helped forge the proposed alliance with the sciences that is central to the new vision for the campus.
“I see this handshake between economy and arts that I don’t think our community has developed or recognized as much as they could. It’s sort of this perfect win-win, this idea of a festival. Then I started talking with Lisa and she brought in the science angle. We’re in the largest temperate rain forest in the world, the center of the last productive fisheries on in the world, right on the edge of one of the most important ecosystems on the planet. And we’re not capitalizing on that in a way we could be.”
And capital is still an issue. Until Sheldon Jackson is rid of its debt the vision of Alaska Arts Southeast will not exist except on paper. Sitka voters on October 5 declined to purchase the college’s PE center, which created a pair of problems: One, the college is now $500,000 short on its repayment plan; and two, the fine arts camp requires a gym for some of its most popular programs.
While it’s possible that local government or private financing may keep the PE center open until Alaska Arts gets its toehold on campus, it will take out-and-out forgiveness to get Sheldon Jackson out of the red. Manager Holst said he and some trustees were planning a visit in the near future to the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the parent company of Alaska Growth Capital, the college’s main creditor, to appeal for a close of one chapter, in the hope of opening another.
Holst said that although he has been advising the trustees for the past eighteen months on a plan to close out the college, the future has always been a part of his thinking. He said, “You can’t have one without the other.”
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