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Elizabeth Siddon: Incumbent Juneau Board of Education candidate
Age: 46
Occupation: Fisheries biologist
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It took place a week after school began – assessments of how schools are doing under the new consolidation plan may have changed.
What is your assessment of how schools are doing under the new consolidation plan?
I think it’s off to a good start. I visited several of the buildings last Thursday for the first day of school. My son goes to Harborview, so I started there. I was able to catch part of the TCLL opening dance and singing and then I headed over to the Dzantik’i Heeni campus. I poked my head into some charter classrooms and Montessori, and Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi.
Then I went out to Thunder Mountain Middle School and got a tour around that facility, now as a middle school. And then at the end of my work day, I stopped in at Juneau Douglas. I also had an opportunity to walk around Juneau Douglas.
A lot of changes, big changes for the community, for staff, for families. Certainly, none of that is lost on me, but I think a lot of the things that we worried about went pretty smoothly.
What were the things you were worried about?
Just the physical logistics of moving that many staff and that many classrooms. Sure, there are still some boxes in classrooms. But by the time I left, transitioned from Harborview to TCLL at 8:30 the hallways in Harborview were empty and quiet. Kids were in their building starting their day. That, to me, to be able to just start it off like that quickly on the first day, I think says a lot to the staff. There was a lot of work that went in this summer to make that happen.
If you could rewind the calendar to early January when you first learned the extent of the district’s financial crisis what would you do differently in terms of process and what you voted on?
I would never want to have to go through it again, right? It was difficult for everyone. I think the piece that I think about as a board member is building a framework for how we were going to use the information. The superintendent did a good job in setting up all of the meetings.
We had lots of meetings and public engagement opportunities, and each of us as board members are gathering and learning at all of those meetings. But as a collective, we didn’t take the time to say a framework or a matrix to say how we will use the information we’re learning from all the different opportunities to hear from the community.
What issues and needs do you feel were overlooked with the budget dominating the board’s attention during the second half of the school year, and what do you see at the top non-budget priorities if you are on the board after the Oct. 1 election?
In my time on the board, I’ve served fairly consistently on the Program Evaluation Committee which is all of our academic curriculum pieces that are operating in the district at any time. Then also the Policy Committee and we have sort of routine schedules of reviewing curriculum and reviewing policies. Those come to mind of things that we got behind on.
Our committee meetings tend to meet once a month. The policy committee, bless their souls, we’ve met every two weeks. So on top of all this budget stuff, we meet every two weeks in order to try to work through those student policies. At some point during the year, I went through and tried to prioritize ones that I felt were most important to address earlier because they would either have an impact on or be impacted by the consolidation decisions. So we sort of prioritized some and then we continued meeting through the summer.
And then for the curriculum review, reviewing elementary math curriculum, reviewing elementary science curriculum. One of the things I am really interested in on the board because of my day job and professional background is STEAM topics.
I’ve been interested and focused on sixth-grade science and how that is looking now that we have it in an elementary building. Those sixth-grade students should be getting a full year of physical science. In an elementary model, with the way the class schedule is it will be very challenging for them to get all of that curriculum. But when they get to Thunder Mountain, they go right to Life Sciences.
The Juneau School District was the first in the state to take steps toward legally challenging a state ban on transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams, but efforts were abandoned due to the budget crisis. Do you believe resuming such a challenge is a good use of district time and resources, and why or why not?
It’s one of those topics, again, that I think about that got overshadowed and got sort of off our plate because we were so busy with the budget.
My understanding at the time was a challenge would require a plaintiff, a student who was being excluded from an activity to then challenge the ban. That’s sort of where that thread dropped off in our ability to tackle it last year. My personal feelings of having to sort of put one student out there feels really unfair to me.
What long-term planning should the school board be considering now given the contradicting future circumstances involving: 1) the homeporting of a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in Juneau during the next few years and 2) a steadily continuing decline in the student population during the coming decade?
From what I understand, it’s about 200 families. We won’t know how many kids that is, or how many high school kids that is. It depends. It’s still a few years out from happening and from families being here with kids in our district. It’ll be interesting at that time, where are our pressure points for building capacity at that time? Because enrollment has been continuing to decline.
We’ll meet that challenge when it comes. We’ll welcome all of them into our district and if there’s situations where there is a building that is at or over capacity — we’ve had elementary schools where we needed modular classrooms in the past — we’ll find solutions. But we can’t build them before we know what they are.
Detail specific accomplishments you (not the board as a whole) achieved on behalf of the Juneau School District.
The one that comes to mind because it was the most recent at our last board meeting is the proposal for our food services contract was to begin charging for breakfast for students. We’ve had a universal free breakfast program since COVID, but in looking at the cost of the food services program, that universal free breakfast is a cost to the district.
With all of our other budget deficits, the recommendation was that just wasn’t a place that we could continue accruing deficit. I spent a lot of time digging into the food services contract and thinking about the impacts to families and kids.
It was also so close to the start of the school year. I made the motion at the meeting to offer universal free breakfast for the first half of the year, to delay that until students are back from winter break. My hope there being we have a conversation with our community partners between now and January and we find community partners willing to help continue to support that program.
Then my other area is special education. That was one of the main reasons I reran is I just felt like I’m so familiar with all aspects of the program-related services, Medicaid funding, reimbursements and integration that I want to be able to continue helping in that area. One in five of our students is in special education.
How do you feel special education is being supported under the consolidation plan?
It’s definitely one of the questions I have. I think it wasn’t a topic we talked about enough and I understand why. But it can’t be an afterthought. There may be places in which it still needs to tweak a little bit. We’ll see.
In a few sentences, what else would you like voters to know about why you are running for school board and hope to achieve?
I think just that I really care about our schools. I care about our students. I care about our staff. There’s a wide variety of topics we have to learn about, understand, and eventually vote on. You don’t get to pick and choose just the things you are interested in. There’s a lot of things that come before us. And I put the time in to learn the topic, to ask questions about the topic, and to form an opinion through asking those questions and learning.
