People carry signs at a Juneau rally in favor of an increase to the amount the government pays schools per student on Jan. 29, 2024. Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon
District leaders and teachers say their colleagues are leaving because of uncertainty in what is usually a stable profession.
Laurie Duncan got her pink slip (dismissal paper) at the end of April 2024, after her second year teaching first grade at Xóots Elementary in Sitka. She got the news during her prep period. She was three months pregnant.
Nearly 20% of the teachers in Sitka were laid off this spring due to financial uncertainty. That included all of the district’s librarians and most of its reading specialists.
I can’t really necessarily get a new job, because I’m about to go on maternity leave in August and have a baby, she said, then laughed. I’m kind of in a bind. This baby’s coming, and I can’t not have the baby anymore!
Duncan has a master’s degree in teaching and plans to stay and raise a family in Sitka, where her husband is from. She had a plan for a long-term substitute teacher for the two months after she delivered. Instead, she lost her health care at the end of May. She didn’t find out she got a job back until July.
She, and a number of other laid-off teachers got rehired recently after Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed into law the Legislature’s one-time, $680 increase to the per pupil funding formula. The boost came after districts painted a desperate picture of their finances during the legislative session and Dunleavy vetoed lawmakers’ attempt to make a significant, long-term increase to the school funding formula. He said it lacked his priorities for education, like bonuses for teachers, more options for charter school approvals and changes to reading education. Lawmakers didn’t override the governor’s veto by one vote.
Districts statewide say the one-time increase helps their finances and allows them to bring back some of the teachers they laid off, but in many cases the news has come too late. Many school boards had already opted for conservative budgets, fearing Dunleavy would veto the one-time funding as he did last year. Some teachers left their districts and communities to seek more stable work.
Duncan said several of her colleagues moved on because they couldn’t risk being out of work.
“You have to make choices for your family, and that’s a big bummer, because we’re losing fantastic teachers,” she said.
The state is unlikely to regain them all, even as officials invest in studies and working groups to solve a recruitment and retention crisis that meant the state’s public schools started last year with nearly 400 unfilled teaching positions that is 5,5% of the total number of Alaska classroom teachers, 7315. Read details
Some teachers move on, or resign
The Ketchikan district laid off more than 50 teachers — roughly a third of its staff — before adding many jobs back on the gamble that Dunleavy would allow most of the Legislature’s one-time funding to stand.
Jill Nordtvedt Lenhard and her husband were both teachers there until they got their pink slips in early May. She said their health insurance was slated to be cut off at the end of June, and they have an autistic son they needed to think about.
We had some really big decisions to make, she said.
Lenhard took a job teaching English in Petersburg where she had worked for roughly two decades. It came with a substantial pay cut because the district only puts 10 years of experience towards the salary scale for rehires. And since her husband, who was tenured in Ketchikan was among the teachers hired back, they will be living apart for the next year.
The governor’s decision to veto that education funding back in March had such wide-ranging impacts on school districts and teachers and administrators and students around the state, she said. But it’s personally created a pretty difficult situation for my family.
Sarah Campbell has taught in the district for 20 years and is the president of the teacher’s union there. She said the district lost a “master teacher” in Lenhard.
I’ve never ever seen such a disruptive and chaotic end to the school year, she said in June. – Teachers are in tears. We’re cutting preschool. We’re cutting — we still don’t have activities funded for next year.
In August, after the one-time funding increase survived the veto process and almost all teachers got called back, she reflected on the cost of the upheaval.
The only reason our district was able to recall all of the teachers back is because we had probably, like, 12 resignations, Campbell said. So, because the layoffs happened and we had people kind of panic, and they’re like, ‘I can’t not have a job next year; I must have a job.’
The scramble to restaff schools is really disruptive to the overall educational program, she said. The district cut its information technology director and curriculum director, and eliminated all the elementary school counselors. Many teachers are going back to new jobs at different schools.
While people may have been recalled back for jobs within our school district, they’re teaching at different schools, different grade levels and potentially different subject matter. So essentially, they’ll be starting all the way over here; it’s like having to rebuild something from scratch, she said.
Campbell said it’s been a stressful time, and said because lawmakers approved only one time funding, “We are going to be in the same exact situation this upcoming school year.”
Michael Robbins, the district’s superintendent, confirmed the district lost about a dozen teachers to other jobs and said consistent funding allows districts to create consistent teacher contracts.
They’re professionals. They put a lot of time and effort into being a teacher, and they should have that consistency, knowing that they’re going to have a job and that they’re going to be able to work in a community that they want to, he said.
The yo-yo of layoff and hire-backs may be counterintuitive against the backdrop of a serious teacher shortage in the state and the nation. Alaska’s university system does not produce enough teachers to fill the teaching position job openings each year, so Alaska must compete with the Lower 48. Some districts hire international teachers or use emergency contracts to staff their classrooms.
Other districts are feeling the turbulence, too.
Anchorage Education Association President Cory Aist has raised the alarm about teachers leaving the Anchorage School District. By the union president’s count, nearly 400 teachers resigned in the last school year from the district alone. The district’s recent average is 200-300 teachers a year, but that number has been increasing.
Our educators are looking for exit strategies, he said in testimony to lawmakers in February.
In the Juneau School District, more than three dozen teachers resigned in an eight-week period this spring, school board member Will Muldoon said in June. The district planned to lay off nearly 50 teachers, but was also able to bring dozens of positions back after Dunleavy signed the budget without vetoing any of the one-time funding for districts. In Juneau that ended up being roughly $5.2 million.
The Juneau School District administration building is seen on April 4, 2024. Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon
Juneau Superintendent Frank Hauser said that, ultimately, the district laid off about four teachers, but that number is only so low because of the teachers who resigned or retired.
In Sitka, the layoffs could have been more extreme, but the district planned to spend down its budget reserve to $10,000 in order to keep teachers and what remains of programs like art, music and physical education.
We had to cut most of our non-tenured teachers, said Superintendent Deidre Johnson, in an email. Fourteen were laid off, 15 transferred within the district. One retired. Five just left.
Mike Vieira, a lifelong Sitkan and a teacher of more than two decades, said both his daughters’ teachers got layoff notices.
Our district has never seen anything like this, he said in June.
In July, the principal at the high school where he teaches resigned for a job in Washington state. The Spanish teacher has more than 35 kids in her class: Her desks are wall to wall, he said.
This is going to be a challenging year all around because of what our new reality is, Vieira said.
Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Superintendent Luke Meinert said funding uncertainty meant schools had a hard time gauging how much staff they could afford. And since districts haven’t had a significant funding increase in nearly a decade, he said schools don’t want to gamble on overstaffing because they lack the financial cushion.
For us here in Fairbanks, we had a pretty conservative proposed budget that had sizable cuts to not only staff, but programs within the district, he said.
This has been a repeated cycle for almost a decade in Alaska, it seems like, but definitely getting worse. And when that happens, we oftentimes lose really great teachers and qualified teachers that we would love to keep in Fairbanks.
He said that is compounded by the fact that it is harder to hire teachers now. Also, Fairbanks is a military community, which can contribute to turnover. This year, the district’s elementary schools are starting the year 20 teachers short — a high, according to Meinert.
Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, R-Nikiski, has taught in Alaska for 15 years and is a member of the Senate Education Committee. He said there’s been significant turnover in the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District for quite awhile, partly because the pay and benefits lag behind the rest of the country, but also because of increasing job instability.
With pink slips being issued year after a year, people just don’t have the certainty that they need to feel comfortable to remain in Alaska, he said.
Abbreviated from: Alaska Beacon
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