Like many others who end up on the school board, Michael Wald started in Haines as a parent looking for a community where he could raise his children safely.
Wald and his partner moved from Fairbanks to Haines about 15 years ago. They still run a wilderness guide service called Arctic Wild, taking travelers through the Brooks Range.
“We spend summers in Fairbanks working. Of course we work in Haines as well, but the business is based in Fairbanks,” he said.
The family put one child through school in Haines from kindergarten to graduation. A second son is junior in high school.
Wald, who has been on the school board for eight years, said he first ran because it seemed like nobody was running.
“Somebody’s got to step up and support the school,” he said. “A lot of what happens on the school board is pretty mundane and there’s a lot of minutia, financial details, and it doesn’t always attract many candidates. I felt like if I was going to have two kids in the district for the entirety of their education, I should step up and do my part.”
One thing Wald said he is proud of during his time on the board is how the schools handled the challenges and decisions around the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Our schools were really successful in navigating the challenges and decisions around keeping a school pretty much continuously open during COVID,” he said. “I’m really glad our kids just got to go to school. You talk to people in other districts about how disruptive that time was in their education, and our kids just really didn’t experience that.”
One of the key issues Wald sees the district facing is the ongoing funding dispute between schools and the state and governor’s office.
“With the legislature enabling him, [he] has undermined the educational system to a point where all the schools across the state – including ours – are really struggling. It’s terribly frustrating to watch at our school,” Wald said.
He said the lack of funding trickles into everything the district tries to do.
“Right now we can’t hire for all of the positions that we are required to have, because nobody will take the job for the money that we have available. It’s not, yeah, these aren’t optional things like, you know, high school students are required to have a science teacher,” he said. “These are things that the state requires us to do, that the state isn’t funding to a level that we can do.”
Realistically, what that could mean for the borough’s school district is more of a reliance on the borough itself to fill in the financial gaps, Wald said.
Stepping away from the morass of educational funding, Wald said he has been heartened to see more of an emphasis on place-based education. A training earlier in the year saw teachers from a handful of Southeast Alaska schools travel to Klukwan to learn about language, culture and grounding students in the environment around them.
“We have a tremendous opportunity at the Haines School, with the community of talented people that we have, with the natural abundance we have around us to [get] kids out of the classroom and get community members into the classroom to broaden our education,” he said.
That could include things like Tlingít language education, though Wald hesitated to say he’d make that a priority without knowing what the cost would be.
“What else are we pulling that money away from? None of these decisions are simple. Staffing is not within the purview of the board, but would I love to see a Tlingít language teacher permanently as part of the school? Absolutely,” he said.
Wald said he does not necessarily want to see more or new programming at the school.
“What I would like to see is that each of the things that we are teaching, and are obliged to teach, be grounded in where we are,” Wald said. “I would like our science classes to have more of a field component. I would like our history classes to be going in and talking to elders. I would like to see the school expand beyond our walls.”
Whatever the end result of the race, Wald said he’s happy to see a competitive race.
“It’s great to see that people want to serve on the school board,” he said. “And, you know, I think that all four of the candidates for the three spots would be assets to the district and I’m just glad to see people stepping forward. It’s exciting.”