Note: Mt. Edgecumbe’s proposed ’25 budget also includes reductions to the school’s classified staff, reduced hours for residential staff, and the elimination of sports travel and extra-duty contracts except what can be supported by the Student Activities Fund. Read the full budget presentation to the Advisory Board.
Travis Vaughn is a parent to Mt. Edgecumbe’s Class of 2024 co-valedictorian. Another child is a senior this year, also near the top of the class in academics, and a state contender in Wrestling.
Vaughn is the president of Mt. Edgecumbe’s Advisory Board. He says board members weren’t completely surprised when they were presented with the proposed budget for next year. Probably baffled is a better word.
“The problem is we’ve made school funding so opaque in this country that nobody can understand it,” said Vaughn. “That’s the source of the real problem, and nobody wants to pay… I don’t know what you do with half the teachers. How does that work?
The Advisory Board doesn’t oversee Mt. Edgecumbe like a local school board. That’s the job of the State Board of Education. Vaughn and his fellow Advisory Board members keep an eye on the things that make a school more than just a brick building with classrooms. Mt. Edgecumbe currently has 32 teachers for its 420 students. Rolling staff back to 15 or 17 positions, plus eliminating the competitive sports programs, is what Vaughn calls “carnage.” I asked him if he believed the school itself was in jeopardy.
Vaughn: What’s the point of a high school with no teachers, no sports, no cultural activities?
KCAW: Will Mt. Edgecumbe close, conceivably?
Vaughn: I don’t think so. I don’t think that that’s a realistic possibility. I don’t think that the political powers that be, they probably understand that that is a disaster that they don’t want to touch because we have alumni in every voting district in the state, and I don’t think they really want to drive us off a cliff.
Listen to the full interview with MEHS Advisory Board president Travis Vaughn.
Sitka Rep. Rebecca Himschoot co-chairs the House Education Committee. “ The problem is that Edgecumbe, when you start cutting into the bone, you impact the program so significantly that you start to wonder if you can even have a school,” she said.
Himschoot has introduced legislation (HB69) to catch-up state education funding with inflation over the next three years. The BSA, or base student allocation – hasn’t significantly increased since 2016. Most school districts, like Sitka’s, have been able to stay afloat by increasing class sizes, and shifting some expenses onto local government. Himschoot says Mt. Edgecumbe is more akin to the 19 rural schools in Alaska’s Regional Education Attendance Areas, or REAA’s, that are not supported by a local tax base.
“And that puts them in an exceedingly difficult position,” she said, “because there is nowhere else to turn. And so that has helped to make the case for why a base student allocation increase is so desperately needed across the state – that’s all those schools have.”
Himschoot’s bill has broad support in the House, but her colleagues have already proposed substitute language (CSHB69) limiting the BSA increase to $1,000, with a $450 reading incentive grant. That language could get the bill passed in the House, but the Senate is a different matter. Sitka Sen. Bert Stedman co-chairs the Senate Finance Committee.
“Frankly, we have significant deficit issues we’re trying to deal with, and those big BSA numbers are probably not going to materialize,” Stedman said.
Stedman managed to find some extra instructional funding for Mt. Edgecumbe last year. It’s not clear to him how the school’s situation could have become so dire in so short a time, with more or less the same number of students and same revenues as this year.
“We’ll have a conversation with the Department of Education, which we do every year at Edgecumbe, and take a look at it,” said Stedman. “But it doesn’t seem to smell right to me.”
Administration’s response: Mt. Edgecumbe’s budget crisis emerged from the COVID pandemic
KCAW received this email from Mt. Edgecumbe Superintendent Suzzuk Huntington:
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mt. Edgecumbe High School increased its staffing while reducing its enrollment to keep a number of rooms empty to mitigate illness for quarantine or isolation. During this time, we added staff to address the increased mental health needs and needs related to learning loss. Now that this federal funding has expired and the pandemic is over, MEHS is moving back to our pre-pandemic staffing ratios with class sizes from as low as six to as high as 30, depending on the course and student interest.
Last school year, the impact of our reduced enrollment came to light when the Fall OASIS data was finalized at 398 students. It caused us to look closely at our management plan. We requested and received support from our state leadership to offset increases in some of our fixed costs and focused the bulk of our efforts building our student enrollment back to pre-pandemic levels. This included sending early-round acceptance letters in April, which has long been our practice. We also re-instituted the process of offering acceptance to students in August, as returning students or accepted students change their minds and decide not to attend MEHS after all. This continued right up to the first day of classes. We were partially successful in our efforts to increase enrollment, but we did not reach the 435-445 target. We started the year with 429 students and had 417 for our official fall count.
Mt. Edgecumbe teachers first learned about some possible cuts last December, and they were reassured by the Commissioner’s office that Mt. Edgecumbe would stay open. But Matt Hunter, president of the union representing teachers (Teacher’s Education Association – Mt. Edgecumbe, or TEAM), doesn’t think it would be the same school if half of the teaching positions were eliminated.
“Our students really thrive when they can have classes like art and music and electives,” he said. “And if we don’t have that, it will be hard to attract kids. So… there’s always efficiencies, but oftentimes they come with a cost that maybe isn’t foreseen.”
Hunter says Mt. Edgecumbe has an incredibly strong program and teaching team. He hopes there will be some reassurance from the legislature soon, before his members begin looking for jobs elsewhere.
In the meantime, Travis Vaughn says the Advisory Board supports the work of Mt. Edgecumbe’s superintendent and the Department of Education – and he’s not laying blame on the legislature, or even the governor. Nevertheless he remains frustrated with state education funding. He sees it as a shell game, and he wouldn’t mind if Alaskans were more upset about it.
“People need to organize on their own and start demanding this money, because for our government to tell teachers, cops and firefighters that there’s no money is just a lie,” said Vaughn.
Having once managed large government contracts for the Army, Vaughn is wary of the “word salad” that accompanies the state education budget. “It’s a magician’s trick,” he says, “to distract you while the man in the black hat walks out the back door with all the money.”
