School board president says she won’t run again at meeting where members assess their response to crisis

Deedie Sorensen says the lofty sense of getting elected to the Juneau Board of Education five years ago quickly turned to the reality that she was “on the pandemic flight.” As president of the board during a retreat meeting Saturday, where she announced she will not seek reelection next year, she told the two newest members they “ended up being on the smokejumper flight.”

Sorensen’s comments were made during a collective self-assessment by the board that mostly focused on their handling of a massive long-term fiscal deficit revealed in January that resulted in a consolidation plan scheduled to take effect July 1.

Board members gave themselves tough grades on things such as maintaining “a culture of mutual trust, honesty, and respect” and offered blunt comments about lacking a sense of direction beyond dealing with immediate issues at hand.

Sorensen, directing her comments related to her impending departure at the newest board members in particular, said it’s essential the board regain its focus on “big-picture things” from its proverbial view at 30,000 feet.

“I felt like I got on the airplane with reservations and then wound up on the pandemic flight,” she said. “And I feel like you guys kind of got on the airplane and then discovered it was not going to whatever destination you thought it was going to, but was actually the smokejumper fight, and by your second meeting they were asking you to hook up the line and get ready to jump into the fire.”

The crisis has resulted in recall efforts against Sorensen and board Vice President Emil Mackey, ostensibly for alleged failures in dealing with a budget crisis for the current fiscal year ending June 30, but with petitioners also citing the consolidation plan passed by the board to help resolve sizable projected deficits in future years. Sorensen said her decision to step down is not due to the recall or budget crisis.

“Even if nothing goes on this year I will not be running for reelection because I don’t want to be 75 and on the Juneau School Board,” she told the other members. “I love you all, but that is not my goal. I’d love to take a trip to Europe or do something else.”

Sorensen, elected to the board in 2019 after teaching in the district for more than 35 years, was reelected in 2022 and her term expires in the fall of 2025.

The four-hour board retreat took place at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School, which will be repurposed under the consolidation plan for Montessori Borealis, Juneau Community Charter School and the alternative Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School, as all students in grades 7-8 will be placed at what is now Thunder Mountain High School. The plan also consolidates all students in grades 9-12 at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé.

Presiding over Saturday’s retreat was Lon Garrison, executive director of the Alaska Association of School Boards, who noted early during the meeting the district found itself in a “catastrophic” situation in January. Reports at the time show the district was facing nearly $10 million deficits in operating budgets of roughly $75 million due to a multitude of district- and state-level factors including accounting errors, declining enrollment and many years of flat per-student funding.

“And you know we’re all human, we’re going to make mistakes, you’re not going to be perfect,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t go back and fix them, or repair parts of it, or whatever. So the piece that I hope as we go through the reflections today is OK, what can you do as a board starting today to begin to work on that piece to come together? And it’s not going to all just happen today.”

Board members, before the meeting, offered assessments of “very good,” satisfactory” or “needs to improve” to 23 statements about the board, with six members responding to each question (Will Muldoon filled out his survey too late to be included in a report presented during the meeting). Statements by board members responding to various questions were also included although, as with the assessments, the names of the members were not disclosed.

However, the board members talked publicly and at length about the results during Saturday’s retreat, with blunt assessments of the difficult situation the board is in and some apologies for past behavior.

In only two categories did a majority of the six board members in the report offer “very good” assessments: preserving the confidentiality of items discussed in executive session (five “very good” and one “satisfactory”), and not using the district/school office for personal needs (four “very good” and one “satisfactory”).

The lowest assessment, with five “needs to improve” and one “satisfactory,” was to the statement “the Board maintains a culture of mutual trust, honesty, and respect through open communication with administrators and each other.” Similarly, four members responded “needs to improve,” one “satisfactory” and one “very good” to the statement “during meetings, board members display politeness, active listening, and respect towards each other and school personnel.”

Board members — experienced and new — agreed during Saturday’s meeting they unexpectedly got thrown into a crisis situation that resulted in a compressed series of marathon meetings sometimes stretching into the wee hours of the morning. That made for a less-than-ideal situation both among district leaders and with the public for the large-scale decisions made within a matter of weeks.

“(I felt) things were rapid-paced, that at times there wasn’t clear understanding and I really struggled with that,” said Britteny Cioni-Haywood, one of two members newly elected to the board last October. “It doesn’t feel like that there has even been a desire for that teamwork. I feel like there’s been times that I’ve just been attacked, too, or discounted.”

David Noon, the other newly elected member, agreed during the initial months of his term “it’s felt difficult to gel in the midst of a process that was pretty taxing on anybody.”

An apology for confrontational statements during the crisis was offered by Mackey, who acknowledged he was angry about the situation because he had warned for years about pitfalls the district was facing only to have those discounted by administrators and board members at the time.

“I was lied to, I was misled and I was gaslighted to a point where I assumed that I slipped and I didn’t understand education policy anymore,” he said. “When this hit you cannot imagine the fury inside me because I was blaming myself for allowing this to happen. I was angry at the previous administration, I was angry at previous boards…and it wasn’t fair to the members of this board. And I want to acknowledge that I should not have worn my emotions on my sleeve so much.”

Also scoring low among the six board members was the statement “Board members refrain from engaging with the public, staff or other board members via text message or email during school board meetings,” in keeping with the bylaws for public engagement (such interactions have occurred openly at meetings, including Noon stating at a recent meeting “my messages are blowing up right now with teachers and staff” in response to comment made by Superintendent Frank Hauser). Four members gave “needs to improve responses” and two “satisfactory.”

Among the other responses by the six board members to the survey:

• “The Board keeps the education and welfare of students as their primary concern.” (3 VG, 1 S, 2 NTI)

• “The Board represents the interests of the entire district rather than a specific group or individual.” (3 S, 3 NTI)

• “The Board Members acknowledge the importance of reaching compromises and commit to supporting the majority decision.” (3 S, 3 NTI)

• “The Board members encourage each other to work together as a team.” (4 S, 2 NTI)

• “The Board acknowledges that making commitments on an individual basis on behalf of the Board is improper.” (3 VG, 2 S, 1 NTI)

• “Board members come to meetings prepared to focus on agenda items and discussion is relevant and concise.” (1 VG, 3 S, 2 NTI)

• “The Board and Superintendent work together in a spirit of mutual trust and respect.” (4 S, 2 NTI)

The members also ranked themselves on an eight-point “dignity index,” with the top score of eight proclaiming “each one of us is born with inherent worth, so we treat everyone with dignity — no matter what” and the low score of one declaring “they’re not even human. It’s our moral duty to destroy them before they destroy us.”

The scores by the board member and superintendent spanned the middle range. Mackey said the overall score is probably a five (“The other side has a right to be here and right to be heard. It’s their country too,” according to the index), but while striving for a level higher than that can also drop below it depending on the situation.

Among the board’s biggest problems is “we don’t have a strategic plan,” Mackey said, declaring the district’s officially declared plan for 2020-25 lacking in meaningful purpose.

“We’ve never had a vision,” he said. “We’ve been listless. We basically are making decisions based upon core values with no direction of where we want to end up. For me that’s exactly why we’re in the crisis that we’re in.”

Others expressed agreement about an overall lack of direction with Muldoon, chair of the board’s finance committee, stating “one of the things that makes me sad is none of us have gotten to be aspirational at all” as the focus has been on dealing with short-term issues.

“I am thankful for the fact that once we get our fiscal house in order, that we will have a fund balance, then that is where we can start working on the things that we do care about and that we did run on,” he said. “Because that’s why we serve, right? No one’s just here to be a housekeeper. That’s not leadership, that’s maintenance. I think that we all have leadership qualities and I would like to be more proactive on that front.”

When Garrison asked if there is one aspirational goal the board could agree on, Noon said such a focus is difficult in the wake of the consolidation due to “an enormous amount of debris that this has all created.”

“It’s hard to be aspirational when right now all I’m thinking about is ‘how are we actually going to pull all this off?” he said. “And what are the actual impacts on students academically, socially and activitieswise? That’s sort of the next part, right? It’s hard for me at the moment to kind of see through that because it’s a mess out there.”

Board member Elizabeth Siddon suggested trying to retain the traditional eager anticipation that many students and educators have on the first day of school as an aspirational initial step.

“You can feel the energy of the community on the first day of school and walking through buildings,” she said. “So I guess if I were to think aspirationally it’s for all of us to picture that in August — what do we want that to look like in August? What do we want that to feel like for the community?”

A concern, Siddon said, is board members with reservations about the consolidation will keep highlighting flaws that occur.

“Nobody said this plan was going to be perfect and that we were going to pull it off without any flaws,” she said. “We’re going to have hiccups and we’re going to have road bumps, but I think we have to keep our eyes on getting to that energy on the first day of school, recognizing we’re going to have to clean up some debris along the way. But I just don’t want us to constantly be like pointing to that debris.”

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.