ISER Report On Lack Of ASD Maintenance And School Board Election Happening Now

 

ISER* has a new study.  Below is the summary.  This link gets you to the whole report.

A new analysis of Alaska’s K-12 Capital Spending shows that the state is not spending what is needed to maintain, renovate, and renew its K-12 school buildings. The study, authored by ISER research professor Bob Loeffler, reviews historical K-12 capital spending from state and local sources from Fiscal Year 2000 through Fiscal Year 2020.  It details the funding sources Alaska uses for large school maintenance, renovation, and construction projects for both municipal and rural areas. The study illustrates the decline in spending after the current budget crisis hit in 2014, and shows how Alaska’s K-12 capital spending falls short of recommended industry guidelines.

“School buildings are among a community’s most valuable physical assets, especially in Alaska,” said Loeffler. “A building’s upkeep or deterioration can be a reflection of the surrounding community and can also affect the quality of education that happens inside. All homeowners understand that regular maintenance is critical to maintaining the value of your property. The same can be said of our school properties. This analysis takes a hard look at how Alaska has been doing in this regard. In short, Alaska is not spending what is needed, especially over the last six years.”

*University of Alaska Anchorage Institute for Social and Economic Research

In four days the Anchorage Municipal elections will end.  (With mail-in voting it doesn't make that much sense to speak about 'election day' any more. And the Municipality of Anchorage switched to all mail-in voting a couple of years ago, though there are drop boxes and you can vote in person in various locations.)

I put the ISER report and the elections together because we are also voting for a number of School Board seats.  

The League of Women's Voters has an on-line overview of the technical details of the election - how to vote, where to vote, when to vote, plus names of all the candidates and descriptions of all the ballot issues.   Below is a list of the School Board candidates.  

Click on image to enlarge and focus

Here's a link to the Anchorage Daily News' candidates forums.  It lists all the questions they asked of mayoral and school board candidates.  Then below is a list of the candidates and links for each and you can see how they answered the questions.  

To help you out, here are a few of the endorsements from different organizations: [I was going to put this all in one table that was neat and easy to compare, but two things happened:  1) I can't find many organizations that actually have endorsements and 2) an old high school friend who read my blog post on the 1963 UCLA-Michigan basketball game called.  He had watched the 2021 UCLA-Michigan game with another high school friend.  They had been part of the group that went to see the 1963 game together.  So that used up a lot of my time.  But it was good.  So I'm just going to present these as I took them off the internet.  

The Alaska Family Council (Strongly anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, pro-Christian) list of candidate endorsements.

Seat A:  No endorsements

Seat B:  Norton-Eledge and Marc Anthony Cox

Seat C: No endorsements

Seat D:  No endorsements

Seat E: Sami Graham and Nial WilliamsJudy

Seat F: Marcus Sanders and Kim Paulson

Seat G: No endorsements

Planned Parenthood: (Strongly pro-abortion [choice], contraception, sex education, women's health)

Anchorage School Board

Seat B: Kelly Lessens

Seat E: Pat Higgins

Seat F: Dora Wilson

Seat G: Carl Jacobs

        

ASEA/AFSCME Union   (Alaska State Employees Association/American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) (For protecting workers' rights)

Anchorage School Board
Name		Seat
Kelly Lessens		B
Dora Wilson		F
Carl Jacobs		G

The Alaska Center (formerly the Alaska Center for the Environment) makes recommendations on the mayoral race and the Recall election, but not for school board.

The School Board races are supposed to be non-partisan.  The Alaska Democratic  Party seems to be honoring that non-partisan spirit since I can't find any endorsements by the Alaska Democratic Party.  However, the Republicans have weighed in.

Republican Party of Alaska