Six community members are competing for four seats on the school board this year. They all sat down with reporter Lizzy Hahn to talk more about why they want to run.
Editor’s note: This year the Chilkat Valley News partnered with KHNS on its election coverage in addition to hosting two candidate forums. A playlist of these profiles, as they are posted, can be found here.
Lizzy Hahn: Do you want to tell me why you chose to run for school board this year?
Jenn Walsh: Well, initially I chose to run for school board because I read an article in the newspaper that said that there were four open seats and zero candidates. And I thought, ‘oh, well, I can help.’ So that was really what started me thinking about that. I care about the school. I care about the impact it has on the future of Haines. I have three kids. My youngest is not even old enough to be at the big school yet. She’s still at Head Start. So I have 14 more years of having children in the school. I serve on a number of boards and I’ve worked with the school even before I had kids, I’ve worked with the school. So it’s something I’m personally passionate about. Also, I’m an educator. So I teach for Alaska Pre-Hospital Education Consortium and I have for the last three years. And I’m actually an educator and I have a board. So an interesting shift of positions there. But I know how directly our board affects us. So it was exciting to consider being a part of the school at that level, at a place where I could make a real difference in policy. That’s why I decided – I mean, it was kind of a long answer – but those were all sort of the thought processes that went into, ‘oh, I do wanna do this, I can do this.’
Yeah, sometimes it’s not as easy as, ‘oh, the spot’s open,’ there’s a bunch of buildup that leads to it. How old are your students who are in the school currently? Are they in elementary school?
Yes, yes, I have two children in elementary school. My daughter is a kindergartner and my son is a fourth grader. He’s actually homeschooling through the school but he goes to the school for lunch and recess and PE and music and art.
What are some of the biggest challenges that you see for the Haines School District and how would you hope to address them if elected?
I think some of the biggest challenges that our school faces is going to be based on funding. I mean, I work for the borough. I don’t know if you know that, but I’ve worked for the borough for the last 15 years. So I’m a firefighter EMT and I have spent a lot of time over the last 15 years, I guess, dealing with the borough budget. So I understand, I guess, the limitations of a budget. I also am well-versed enough in the budget to know what percentage of our budget is going to the school, which, I mean, it’s almost half of the general fund. It’s kind of huge. It’s like almost $3 million. I know that the cost of living, I mean, I live here, the cost of living has really increased and the state funding for our schools hasn’t [increased] at the same rate. So I think that budget challenges, which then really leads to our enrollment, that leads to like this whole bigger question that I feel like town has really been spending a lot of time talking about. Is this a place that’s possible for young families to live? You know, around the childcare issues or the preschool closing. I think the budget is gonna be probably a big part of what the school board is dealing with. I think that it, yes, goes hand-in-hand with enrollment. It also goes hand-in-hand with recruitment and retention. My kids now have been at the big school for the last five years. It’s always incredible to read the newspaper about ‘here’s our new teachers this year.’ And it’s not one, it’s like a spread. So I think the school board has done some big work in the recruitment and retention world with increasing teacher pay. That was a really big problem borough wide, just our employees making less than similar size cities in Southeast Alaska. I think that they just had union negotiations so I think they got another 5% increase and maybe it’s gonna be four and then three over the next two years. But I think that’s really gonna help that problem of the recruitment and retention of teachers. But I think that that is another big issue. I personally feel motivated to be part of the board because when Darwin Feakes was the vocational education teacher, he was also an ETT, an Emergency Trauma Technician Instructor. And there were a lot of students at the Haines School who went through the ETT program, which really falls squarely into pre-hospital education. But since he left, we don’t have that space filled. I think being an advocate for voc-ed is something that I will be very interested in. Over the last, I don’t know, a few years, I have been more involved in the school in terms of safety meetings and like with the Haines Borough Police and working on their emergency action plan and then how that directly reflects on the Haines Volunteer Fire Department’s emergency action plan. Being a part of those conversations is important, but I feel like being on the school board will just involve me at that much higher of a level. So I guess in summary, the issues I feel like we’re facing, the budget, without a real deep dive into that, I’m not sure exactly what I’m gonna do. I don’t know what I’m gonna be able to do for that. I think that I am excited to work on the voc-ed aspects and continue working on the safety aspects. I think that’s important.
You mentioned the preschool closure. Did that impact you personally? Like your daughter in Head Start, was she in the preschool or?
No, my kids have gone to Head Start at least for the last handful of years. So that did not directly affect me. It does directly affect me for summer programming.
How so?
Well, because the Chilkat Valley Preschool oftentimes offered a summer program for the kids who aren’t quite old enough to be involved in a lot of the summer camps. So they’re not old enough to do that and they’re still too young to be left home alone.
You brought up funding, which was actually gonna be my next question. This is a common topic right now. At what level should schools be funded? Do you think that this is a statewide funding issue, borough funding issue, federal funding issue? How do you think that you could respond to it as a school board member and help either bring in more funding from the higher entities or not?
Well, I mean, right now I believe that the borough is funding the school at its max capacity. Like I don’t actually believe it’s allowed to fund the school anymore. If the school is still operating in a deficit, then there’s obviously an issue. I guess you could probably argue that there is an issue with how current funding is being allocated or the amount of state and federal funding that is being allocated. I know that other communities in Southeast Alaska do a variety, I guess, of taxing. But aside from what you would pay into the general fund, like aside from a mill rate type thing, I think Sitka has a marijuana tax that they use to fund their, I think maybe their extracurricular activities. I don’t know currently enough about what the specific school funding is versus what the state is giving and where in that process we can be effective, whether if that’s at like a lobbying type level or a more local community level. And I think that a lot of that information could be gathered also. I mean, when you think about people who are applying to the jobs in Haines, if it is a problem of our wage and our cost of living, but looking closely at that, I mean, we’re not gonna change, I don’t think probably without another union round of negotiations, I don’t think we’re gonna be changing those wages. But it would take probably a more specific look into where money is currently going to be able to really specifically answer that. And I don’t have more specific look at that.
Something else that you mentioned earlier on with some of the challenges is teacher turnover. There’s been a lot of turnover in Alaska as a whole in the education field.
Even in my company.
How do you hope to address this large issue here locally? Some others mentioned that it is kind of a multi-tiered process of the cost of living being so high and housing being an issue and wages being low. What do you think about how to potentially retain teachers?
Well, I know that at a couple of the student advisory committee meetings, it was brought up that when we do bring new people into this community, we as a school community need to make a concerted effort at integrating them into the community. And I think that that is also seen in the Haines Volunteer Fire Department. The more that we integrate new members, the more likely they are to develop a community and develop it quicker so that they’re more inclined to stay. I mean, obviously I love this community. I’m vested in this community. I wanna be here and I do wanna share it. And because I am so integrated into the community, I think that even in terms of the fire department, I don’t do as good of a job as I could and should in the integration of new members and helping them feel welcome. I think that the school could do that. I think that the school could do that during the onboarding process of new instructors and then continually throughout so that even outside of their school community, they can develop a community within Haines that’s larger. I think that if Haines is a place for them and they’ve already decided that in their heart, then I think that what would help keep them here would be a concerted push toward helping them develop their community here. And I think we could do that with activities or dinners or things that Haines is good at.
I have noticed that in Haines as well. In my few months here, it is a lot of community engagement, slowly just becoming integrated. Like, ‘oh, come over to dinner at my house.’
And that could be done initially at a school level, right? With school board members, other teachers, families, and then it could expand from there, yeah. And I think a lot of members of the community all have the thing that they’re passionate about here, whether it’s art or outdoor activities, but I guess helping to link the people who are new to town with what their passion is and what is appealing to Haines for themselves, I feel like that would be beneficial in retention.
Shifting topics slightly, AI is starting to be such a large part of our world, if we want to or not. Do you use AI? If so, how? And how do you think students should learn to use it in school? Should they learn to use it in school? What do you think about AI?
Okay, what do I think about AI? I use AI, absolutely. And you asked me, how do I use AI? One of the things that I love using AI for the most is creating patient scenarios for my EMT students. So it is incredible that I can put in a patient, say I want to have an elderly female patient who has a three-day history of slight fever and increased urination. Please develop a scenario based around the EMTs needing to find out that she has a UTI and sepsis. And it will just give you stacked vitals over every five minutes. It will say vitals with and without appropriate interventions. And it really helps a lot of my scenario development so that I can spend more time on things like moulaging a patient or creating a physical scenario that’s more realistic for the students. So that’s one of the ways that I use AI. What was the rest of the question?
How do you think students should use it? Should they learn to use it in schools?
I feel like critical thinking is a skill that is, as a parent of a nine-year-old, I feel like this is something that we are constantly working on. Even in some of my son’s activities, like for his own schoolwork, I’m like, ‘whoa, man, if you could put that into ChatGPT, that’d be real easy.’ But I feel like it needs to be used thoughtfully. I feel like if a student was gonna be, I mean, I can only use my son in this example because I worked with him in this, and he had to make a Venn diagram about similarities and differences and where things were the same. I made him do the entire assignment by using research and a standard Google search. And I had him create his Venn diagram. And then I said, okay, great. Now put your assignment into ChatGPT. Is there anything that you think you should add? Is there anything that you should take away? Was there another point made? So yeah, I think you have to continue to teach critical thinking, but you can’t discount it as a tool. Yeah, and I guess in another thing, it is hard to organize thoughts. It is hard to organize any thoughts, not even just like a simple Venn diagram, but to write a paper. And I feel that these are fundamental skills that you can’t ChatGPT through the process of learning how to do it. So I think it’s really important that students understand the tool and they. I think it’s important that we don’t take away their opportunities to learn the underlying skills, like a straight Google search or going to the library or asking qualified references. In my EMT class, one of the assignments that the students have to make is that they have to do a drug card for every medication that an EMT basic is allowed to give, and there are 10, they have to make a flashcard, a straight up flashcard. And they have to be able to write on the front the name of the drug, and then on the back, nine different things about the drug, the class of the medication, indications, contraindications, potential adverse side effects, dose. I make all of my students handwrite them. And because handwriting is one of these other things that I feel like is important and we need to work on, but there’s also an element of learning within that. And so I know that they could put that into ChatGPT and their drug cards would get spit out, which is why I make them handwrite them. At the very least, if they use ChatGPT to create them, at least they had to write them and then they had that extra step of learning that was in there. I don’t know. Did that answer the whole question? Your questions have a lot of parts, and then when I get started in the beginning, I’m like, did I answer the end part?
The EMT classes, are those taught at the high school level, middle school, or just like EMT classes for all who want to take them?
That’s a really good question. I actually worked with the school a few years ago, with two high school students who wanted to take an EMT class, but it wasn’t being offered at the school anymore. So they actually took it through Alaska Pre-Hospital Education Consortium, and I was their instructor. And they did the entire class during their last semester of high school. At the end of the class, EMT students have to attend a 40-hour skills practical session on top of all of the hours that they’ve spent going through 41 chapters in the book. So two Haines high school students did take that class, and we have one Haines high school student who’s in that class right now. He’s actually in Juneau this week taking his final practical assessment. I’m very excited for him. I’ve been checking in with him via text pretty frequently, maybe annoyingly frequently, just to see that he’s doing okay. He is actually not going to be 18 for another, I don’t know, six months. So he actually can’t take his certification exam until he’s 18, but he will be finished with all of the work and ready to take that test. He was actually an ETT student that was taught by Darwin, when Darwin was the voc-ed teacher at the Haines school. So you have to be 18 to be certified. You can take the class before that, but the class that I teach is just for students really all around the state. It is hard to live in a small community and take an EMT class. It’s really hard. I had to travel outside of Haines to move beyond my EMT-1 level. So the company that I work for offers not only an EMT class, but an AEMT class, an advanced EMT class. So that’s just really being offered to a lot of the more remote places in Alaska. I feel pretty passionate about it.
For this student who is going to, when he turns 18, get the certificate: what level of care or help can he provide? Is this like you’re driving the ambulance around or at what level does that get you to?
An EMT basic level, like I said, you can administer 10 medications and a lot of them are pretty life-saving. I mean, intramuscular injections of epinephrine for anaphylaxis, acetaminophen, nebulized albuterol treatments for people who have COPD or asthma. You’ll be certified to operate at the level of EMT, so emergency medical technician basic, and it’s a national certification. You can turn it into the state of Alaska and for $25 they’ll give you the state of Alaska EMT certification, but you can do that in all the states, which is the neat part about taking a national level course. So basic life support is really the foundation of everything we do on an ambulance call. So there’s a lot of interventions that an EMT can do. And driving comes with its own set of training. So you can be certified to help care for, treat and save patients, but maybe not necessarily drive yet.
My last question that I have for you: what does a successful term look like if you were to be elected either a year from now or three years from now? What do you hope to have accomplished in your time if you were elected?
I think that I would feel like it was successful as I did get, and all of this is to say that like, I also understand what it is to hire or vote or elect somebody onto a school board who’s new to the school board. There’s gonna be a big learning curve. So I think what I can expect from the first year is gonna be different than what I can expect by the third year. I think in the first year, there’s gonna be a lot of learning that takes place. There’s gonna be a lot of listening. Again though, I do feel like that’s where being an EMT and being on the ambulance crew for the last 15 years, I mean, it’s our whole job is to go in, gather information, listen to a story, put it together with the things that you’ve learned and make a decision regardless of if there even is a perfect answer. And so I think that my goal for the first year will be to be up to speed on the current policies, on the procedures. And I don’t know, is it too lofty of a goal to hope that we could have ETT training back in the school within the next year? Does that sound too lofty? I guess I would have to talk to the board as a whole to know that. Then over the next three years, I would really hope to see, yeah, good policies surrounding voc-ed. I do feel passionate about some outdoor programming. And to understand the budget enough to be able to affect positive change so that we don’t operate in a deficit, to be able to do something and to be able to help.
I think that a willingness to ask questions and an ability to listen to different sides of opinions and change my own opinions when I don’t have enough data will be something that I bring to the board. I think that without being in there and knowing what is possible, it does feel lofty to make a goal if I don’t want a school board member to think, well, that’s not gonna be possible. But I’d really like to be able to see where we’re at so that we don’t have to cut any programs and so that we continue to offer the students all of the opportunities. Feels like a generic answer, but that feels like an honest answer.