Mitch Mork
Community involvement, past and present:
I volunteer in classrooms helping with math, field trips, and special projects. I am the president of the Baranof Ballers board and have coached teams from 1st grade to 6th grade.
Have you previously run for office? When and what office?
None
Previous government or other relevant experience:
None
Why are you running for a seat on the Sitka School Board this year?
Someone has to do it. I have the energy and passion for education, and it’s a good time in my life to try to help. Honestly, I’m probably more help to the schools with hands on work, but my engineering background should help aid positive decision making on the board.
What are your top two priorities if elected?
Efficiency and making sure we aren’t doing things in the district simply because that’s the way it has always been done. Any improvements should have outcomes that improve children’s or the faculty/staff lives without compromising education.
Ballot Prop 1:
Do you support Ballot Prop 1, which would establish a consumer sales tax on cannabis and cannabis products, and would direct that money to the Sitka School District’s Student Activities Fund? Why or why not?
Yes. Take this with a grain of salt because I made the decision long ago not to use marijuana and stuck with it, so my knowledge and assumptions for calculations are based on 30 minutes of researching marijuana for this question. Using online prices that I did not validate, I calculated that this tax would result in users paying roughly 16 cents additional tax per joint. A lot of people won’t even trouble themselves to bend over to pick up a coin/dime on the street, so this seems like a palatable expense for a recreational purchase that will benefit the Sitka youth.
If the cannabis measure does not pass, are there next steps the school board should take to bolster funding for student activities?
Funding:
The Sitka Assembly recently has been spending the maximum allowed by state law on instructional expenses in the school district – the so-called “cap” – and spending money over-and-above the cap on things like student activities, and operational expenses at the Blatchley Pool and Sitka Performing Arts Center. Do you support this spending plan, or would you challenge it?
All expenditures should be challenged every year. A challenge doesn’t have to be in depth. I haven’t examined the budget thoroughly enough to understand if this is appropriate, but I suspect it is. This will require a lot more learning before I can say whether I support this or not.
Teacher Salary:
This year – for the first time in 25 years – the district and teachers’ union reached a formal impasse in bargaining, and finally settled on a two-year contract on the last day of school (rather than the usual three-year contract). As a board member, where would you stand on the renegotiation? Hold the line on teacher salaries, or support a more competitive payscale to recruit the best educators?
I don’t have enough knowledge yet to say how other states or even communities are able to be more competitive than Sitka. I definitely want to retain our great teachers and recruit more when needed, and this is only possible if our salaries are competitive or cost of living is lower. I also know the district has to be sustainable. We can’t give what we don’t have and we only have what the state and city decides is good enough. If we need to be more competitive but don’t have the funds, our only choice seems to be to find a way to re-balance the budget without negatively impacting the kids. My understanding is that the majority of the budget goes to payroll. This, unfortunately, means that taking a little bit of money from facilities (or another small piece of the pie) to give to the teachers, for example, would drastically impact facilities while having little impact on teacher compensation. And dividing the payroll amongst less people with classes structured as is would result in larger class sizes and theoretically less learning.
Classroom Size:
Pupil-Teacher Ratios always come up for discussion when the district is budgeting. What are your thoughts on class size in the elementary, middle, and high schools?
There is a sweet spot. Smaller classes cost more and funds are limited. Most teachers know the number of kids where they feel instruction starts to get difficult to manage. I assume the data is available showing that as class sizes increase from one student, the loss of productivity is negligible at first and accelerates as the class size increases. At some point, class size exceeds a teacher’s threshold (varies by teacher) and the productivity drops significantly which threatens both student growth and teacher job satisfaction. I believe the board’s priority is to ensure we don’t exceed that threshold. If we have a graph showing what the absolute limit is at each level (look at other district performance vs class size data) and we know what the cost is to get to the next level, those discussions should be relatively easy. I do think there is a way to leverage the fact that different subjects have different thresholds and older kids can handle more independent work time. An example of a hybrid options would be a 5th grade teacher leaving their class with an aid during an art project or reading time to go help with math in a 2nd grade class that exceeds their math class size threshold. This complicates teacher movement, but theoretically would allow for higher salaries without increasing the work and without hindering student performance. But I am not a trained educator, so there may be an obvious reason why something like this wouldn’t work.
Extracurricular Activities:
Extracurricular activities are a costly part of public education, and much of the expense associated with being in a sport, or in band, or in theater falls on parents – raising a problem of equity. Not all families can afford for their children to participate in activities. How would you address this issue as a school board member?
Typical fundraising by the students and prop 1 taxes. Possibly create a system where the school pays the fees for traveling kids if they help tudor/teach younger kids. This eases the performance burden on the elementary teachers, provides excellent experience for older kids, and theoretically could allow slightly larger elementary class sizes. Larger class sizes could increase competitiveness of teacher pay. Other than the prop 1 taxes, I am not aware of any non-fundraising options to help pay for extracurricular activities. Like I said earlier, I like the idea of the chore busters program because it helps the community, provides kids with work experience, and raises money for the kids. There are plenty of other creative fundraising ideas for individual teams to try also. Coaches should network with other coaches on fundraising. Just this before school started, I was talking with a Juneau coach who shared an excellent fundraising idea. This idea was then passed onto our SHS counterpart who will likely implement the fundraiser.
COVID:
During the last school year, the school board left much of the decision-making about COVID response to the administration. Do you have any thoughts that might help us understand how you would approach the situation, were we to face similar circumstances in the future?
Social Emotional Learning:
Social emotional learning and culturally responsive teaching are both guiding principles in the district. Do you support the continued emphasis on these approaches to education? Why or why not?
Honestly, I think that I understand what this means on paper, but in the classroom I’m not 100% sure what this looks like. I assume this means respecting everyone and trying to see things from other points of view. I’m sure this isn’t always done in classrooms, but most teachers that I have interacted with in recent years will do this naturally. In any case, I definitely support Social emotional learning and culturally responsive teaching.
Baranof Elementary:
How do you feel about renaming Baranof Elementary School?
First of all, I am Tlingit and I’m not the most sentimental person. Names of places don’t matter much to me, but I know there are a lot of people sensitive to names, so changing the name is okay with me. From a purely practical standpoint, though, renaming the school may not be the best use of community funds. The playground equipment at Keet, for example, is falling apart and the name change money could be used to improve the playground. Regardless of if the name change is funded by school money or outside sources, most people would rank the health, safety, and enjoyment of our kids higher than a school name change. The rough estimate of $80,000 for a name change could also be better spent in classrooms. Perhaps it would even be better to spend the money on a cultural school/class project instead that would be more meaningful. I’m assuming the motivation behind this change is to stop honoring a guy who did bad things to the locals and honor the original users of this land. In modern society, if it was common practice for a group of people to travel to neighboring communities to murder the men and take the women and children as slaves, we would choose to distance our schools from that group and surely wouldn’t name the building after anything associated with that group. While the version of history that we are familiar with says Baranof was guilty of these actions, we also know that Tlingit culture thrived because of these same actions taken by the Tlingits themselves. Even the Christians were committing atrocities across the world. This was simply the way of the world at the time. The only way to ensure we associate our school with pure and clean history is to honor something from recent history and start the slow path of erasing the parts of history that we don’t like by changing the name. I am far from a history buff, so choosing a name seems to be a tricky task that I don’t want to see our school spend it’s time and resources dealing with. If a local group would rather put their money into a name than something that helps the kids, then I am definitely not against it. My only request would be that it should be easy for kindergarteners to say.
