In the Kodiak Island Borough School District’s conference room, it felt more like a funeral than a school board meeting. Not a single attendee gave public comment until after the board voted to close North Star Elementary.
“I was one of those students that sat on the floor and was in the opening,” Valerie Lukin recalled. She’s now a teacher at Main Elementary. “We opened the doors and lit off the cannon at North Star Elementary and I was in third grade. So it kind of hurts my heart a lot.”
She was one of about a dozen community members who shared public comments near the end of the meeting.
“It kind of hurts my heart a lot and I just want North Star families and people to know that we are all standing behind them,” she said. “Whether we are teaching at Main or North Star or East, everybody is going to try to stand behind each other and be strong.”
Almost everyone who talked gave similar sentiments. Some cried.
The decision comes after the district held four public meetings and opened a survey for people to share their thoughts about school closure.
Everyone said they didn’t want to close a school. But district officials said it was running out of other ways to make ends meet after years of flat funding from the state government — and closing a school could save the district millions.
While one-time funding boosts have helped, officials said they need a boost to the state’s per-student education funding formula, or Base Student Allocation.
“The state’s inability to increase the BSA for years has led directly to this budget crisis and contributed, I believe anyway, to a whole lot of other issues we’re facing as a school district, a community, and a state,” said Board President Kerry Irons.
The Alaska Legislature passed a bill in 2024 that would have increased the Base Student Allocation, but Gov. Dunleavy vetoed it, claiming he wanted to see more support for charter schools. A spokesperson for the governor did not respond to requests for comment in time for this publication.
While local funding from the borough has gone up, it isn’t enough for the district to keep pace with inflation, rising maintenance costs, or make up for lower student counts.
The district has to make up an $8 million budget gap for next school year. That’s on top of millions of dollars of reductions in recent years.
For weeks, the board and district staff have tossed around ideas of which school it would close.
Closing Main or North Star was an early possibility — those schools have the fewest classrooms. But when Superintendent Cyndy Mika presented her research at a work session, she recommended closing North Star or Peterson. The following week, East Elementary was floated as an option.
Irons said they decided to close North Star because it had the fewest students with addresses near the facility as well as the low number of classrooms.
“Closing a school is obviously a really drastic measure, and it’s also a direct result of a budget deficit that can’t be reasonably filled in any other way,” she said.
At the same meeting, the board voted to stratify schools and combine grade levels at the town’s remaining schools. For example, all of the town’s kids at a single grade level will go to the same school instead of each school offering Kindergarten through fifth grade. Main and East will split into upper and lower elementary schools as part of the shift.
That means much of the district’s staff will get shuffled around before next school year.
Danielle Spect is a special education teacher who taught at North Star for 17 years.
“Now that this decision has been made, I want to emphasize that this truly needs to be three schools closing and two opening,” she said at the meeting. “I support rebranding and ensuring that the treasured traditions of all three schools are incorporated into the restructured schools.”
Kodiak now joins other major municipalities, like Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, that have recently closed schools.
Closing North Star is expected to make up less than half the district’s deficit. That means more budget cuts are likely for the schools that aren’t closing. But in her closing comments, Board President Irons asked for space for North Star families to grieve.
“If you’re from one of those elementary school communities, please, when you think of the changes that lie ahead for you, be sensitive to the changes that the North Star community faces,” she said. “Theirs is the hardest change by far.”
This isn’t the end for the North Star building though. The Board of Education also voted to try to keep its gym open, since it’s the nicest one, but the budget might not allow for that.
The board still needs to present a draft budget to the Borough Assembly later this year.
