Merissa Koller-Williams. Kayla Desroches/KMXT A seasonal school district employee who discovered the position makes her ineligible to serve on the Kodiak Island Borough Board of Education is asking voters not to cast their ballots in her favor in the upcoming election. Merissa Koller-Williams is the director of the Healthy Tomorrows community wellness program, and also serves as the Kodiak High …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT Preschool in the Kodiak Island Borough began last week and one outdoor program which debuted last year has just opened a class for 3 and 4-year-olds. The expansion at the Kodiak Baptist Mission comes after its success last year with 4 and 5-year-olds. Lead outdoor preschool teacher, Josh Bell, says the outdoor class idea was a dream of …

Pink salmon. Photo by Nicole Beaulac / Flickr Kayla Desroches/KMXT The pink salmon run was a bad one this year, not just for Kodiak, but for the entire Gulf of Alaska. Alaska Department of Fish and Game area management biologist, James Jackson, says on a good year they’d catch an average of 15 million pinks. He says last year they …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT There was a float plane accident in Kodiak with no fatalities Friday afternoon. According to Petty Officer Bill Colclough in the Anchorage Coast Guard Public Affairs Office, a de Havilland DHC-2 floatplane carrying three people crashed in the vicinity of Uganik Lake. According to Petty Officer Kelly Parker from the Kodiak Public Affairs Office, the command center in …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT Marine debris clean-up at Shuyak Island State Park just concluded for the year. Over the course of three months, local nonprofit Island Trails Network deployed volunteers to pick up the debris that catches on the bays and lagoons of western Shuyak Island. By the end of the project, volunteers had gathered 70,000 pounds of debris, which ITN has …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT If the City of Kodiak hopes the Kodiak Island Borough will reconsider a recent change in building code, the borough assembly has so far not made any moves in that direction. If anything, it’s educating itself more on its shift back to the 1997 Uniform Building Code. The city and borough currently have a memorandum of agreement to …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT The Coast Guard recently opened 20 new housing units on base Kodiak. Personnel department head, Commander Brian Chambers, says the last neighborhood the Coast Guard built on the island was Aviation Hill between the late 90s and 2003. The development of these most recent duplexes began a couple of years ago. Construction company Tutor Perini Corporation broke ground …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT The Kodiak City Council’s upcoming regular meeting will cover a few different financial decisions, including bonds and the purchase of new police cars. As explained in the meeting packet, the council will look over three different harbor-related resolutions authorizing the city manager to go ahead with bond refunding. Much is reliant on market conditions and therefore subject to …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT Sea mammals were a staple in historic Alutiiq diets, and a lecture this week will cover the traditional methods and rituals of hunting them. Alutiiq Museum Curator of Archaeology Patrick Saltonstall says Alutiiq people hunted whales, porpoises, fur seals, and sea otters, and used a variety of projectile weapons. “They’d hunt them with throwing boards. They’d use it …

Kayla Desroches/KMXT Hands-on experience is invaluable when learning how to repair vessel machinery on sea and land. That’s the difference between knowing how to fix a device and being able to do it in real life. The maritime workforce development coordinator at Kodiak College, LA Holmes, says all the maritime workshops help the students recreate what they’ll experience in the …