During a special meeting on Saturday, April 12, the Ketchikan School Board voted to move ahead with a previously approved plan to restructure schools. The cost-cutting plan will consolidate the island’s three elementary schools by grade level. The decision came after some community members floated an alternative plan to create multi-age classrooms, which the board considered, then voted down.
The board heard more than an hour of emotional public comments, as it has grown accustomed to in recent months. Shari Montgomery said if the district separates Kindergarten through third from the fourth through sixth graders, her sons would never get to attend the same school.
“Harrison will never be able to look out for Jack Jack on the playground or the bus,” Montgomery said. “They’ll never perform in a Christmas concert together. They won’t wrestle on the same team or share lunch table together.”
The School Board had voted back in February to approve the restructuring plan, but the board held a special Saturday meeting to reconsider it. The restructuring plan consolidates Kindergarten through third grade at the island’s two outlying elementary schools, and sends all fourth through sixth graders to the central school. That decision sparked a community uproar, and since then, two School Board members and the district superintendent have resigned.
A group of community members then circulated alternate cost-saving proposals, and the board subsequently asked staff to examine one of those ideas — creating multi-age classrooms. On Saturday, the board considered a motion to implement that multi-age model instead of the school restructuring plan. Before the vote, a number of local educators spoke in favor of keeping the restructuring plan.
Dollee Robinson has worked in the district for several years and said she had been hesitant to speak because she didn’t want to lose friends who disagreed with her. She said she could see the benefits of restructuring, like more streamlined instruction and preventing further cuts to the kind of programs that keep older students engaged.
“I’m in support of specialization because I don’t want any more cut from secondary,” Robinson said. “I have four kids school age, so I’m the whole range from elementary to Kayhi. The little kids, we can make them go to school. They’re going to listen. My high school kids, I can’t force to go to school.”
Board president Katherine Tatsuda said that while she has concerns about the restructuring plan and knows it will come with challenges, she felt it would provide better educational opportunites than the alternative. Tatsuda shared that her father Bill had passed away the day before the meeting. Their family had owned a community grocery store until it was destroyed in 2020.
“Change sucks. It’s hard. And loss is hard — loss of what we know, loss of what we love. But change can be transformative, and we can do hard things,” Tatsuda said. “And so my hope is, if this is the way that we go, that we as a community can come together and say, ‘Alright, we’re going to do the best that we can.’”
The vote to revoke the restructuring plan in favor of the multi-age classroom model failed 1 to 4, with Ali Ginter the lone yes vote. The board plans to interview and appoint two new members during their meeting on Wednesday, and present a budget that needs to be submitted to the borough by May 1.
