The archipelago’s community is expected to drop by more than 20 percent in the next 25 years. That’s according to a recent report from Alaska Economic Trends, a state-government-published magazine.
David Howell, a demographer with the Alaska Department of Labor, wrote the report. He said birth rates would be high enough to keep the population steady, but too many people are leaving.
“We do see growth through natural increase early on in the projected period, but the losses to the net migration end up cancelling that out and we end up with population losses,” Howell said.
Outmigration has been Kodiak’s problem for some time. At the same time, the population that will stay is expected to get older. Kodiak’s median age is projected to jump from 36 to 42 years old over the next quarter century.
Those are just some factors in his calculations for the Kodiak Island Borough.
“That older population, you end up with more people dying, of course as they hit those higher mortality age groups but also less people at those high birth ages – in their 20s and 30s,” Howell said. “So you see less and less births through that, through the aging of the population.”
The island is following a national trend for rural areas everywhere as more people have been flocking to population centers like cities and the massive slump in commercial fisheries means many Gulf of Alaska communities are already losing population.
In Kodiak, the school district is considering closing one of its elementary schools. The two on the chopping block are Main and North Star – the two smallest in or near town. The other two, Peterson on the Coast Guard base and East, each have almost twice as many classrooms as the smaller ones.
Nothing’s been finalized yet, but the district’s board asked its superintendent, Cyndy Mika, to look into it toward the end of last school year.
“We have a declining enrollment, and it’s been declining for the past 15 years, at least, and it declined even more this year than we expected – we didn’t make our mark,” she said.
Districts in Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks have all approved closures in the face of budget and enrollment problems in the last year.
In Kodiak, the district’s student count fell by 33 students more than the decline they had already planned for. Mika said she doesn’t know how much money they’ll be short by, but it will have to come out of the district’s savings.
That’s on top of an over $4 million budget reduction from year to year.Mika said that between the shrinking population and flat funding from the state, something has to give.
“For two years now, I’ve hoped, and I’ve learned that hope is not the way to go,” Mika said. “You can’t write checks with hope.”
The superintendent said she’s not sure when or if she’ll present a school to cut, in the hopes she can find a way to reorganize schools to save money instead.
