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Will Muldoon: Incumbent Juneau Board of Education candidate
Age: 40
Occupation: Analytics manager
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?
We’re a week into it and there has been some growing pains, but I want to highlight that I am proud of the staff and the administration for getting us from there to here, right? That was a substantial amount of work to close facilities, to prep the facilities, reconfigure. Dzantik’i Heeni went through pretty substantial programmatic overhauls with now housing the alternative education. I’m extremely happy with how that’s gone.
We have heard some issues regarding bussing. We had some staffing difficulties that made us concerned about deployment of the Kinder Ready programs.
Were you concerned about Kinder Ready because of the staffing vacancies?
Those vacancies, they have a systemic effect districtwide. The Kinder Ready programs were one of the ones that were impacted. We’ve heard from community members on that. We believe that one’s going to be open and not impacted further.
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 was the one that made the motion that ultimately passed, so I probably would vote the same way, right? I would support my motion if I were to make it. So on that end, I’m confident that the choice I made in that regard is the right one because my focus was on staff and program retention versus building retention. I know that is a polarizing issue in this community for a multitude of reasons, but it is one that I believe and still support.
Looking back, what could we do differently? I would have preferred a little bit more time to develop things like matrix and flow charts and workflows for how to handle a decision like this.
Because that is a difficult thing to make sure that you have shared understanding of facts and we’re using the same word the same way. Those little things can make a big difference. We didn’t have time.
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?
One of the biggest things I would say is our budget revision cycle. We tend to have a budget revision right at January and we obviously weren’t ready for it. And then we also needed to craft out a budget that was substantially different than the ones we had operated under, so that revision actually got put behind the passage of the budget, and then that is just harder for everybody.
It’s hard for us as board members to keep track of where we are for closing out the fiscal year. It’s hard for the community to have a sense of where we are in a general sense. I would have liked to have worked on that a little bit more.
When I was first elected in 2021, the Board of Education had previously not had a finance committee, and it’s been back and forth. They’ve had it for years. They’ve not had it. It was spinning back up when I was elected. One of the things we’re working on now that I really would have liked to have worked on maybe in February, was setting out our expectations for what gets addressed in each of those meetings.
What do you see as the top non-budget priorities if you are on the board after the Oct. 1 election?
My initial response to that is we are entering a negotiation year with our collective bargaining units next year and that’s extremely important. They’ve had a really tough run with flat state funding through COVID and then our budget issues probably compounded a lot of the tough feelings. I think that’s number one. It has budgetary impacts, but it itself is not a budget item, right?
Then also, again, very strongly tied to the budget, but in itself, not a budgetary item. It’s just enrollment and what the current year is looking like, right? We get the rough draft of the counts and then right after the election is kind of when the true OASIS counts come out from the state. Those are the big ones for me, knowing where we’re at with our enrollment. Are the trends continuing? Are they changing? And a successful negotiation process for the district and its memberships.
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?
I was on the record that I was supportive of that and we did take those actions to begin discussions with our attorneys, and also reach out to outside counsel, ACLU or a similar group that would take that on. Then the budget took the oxygen out of the room, everyone is aware of that. I do not support the Alaska School Activities Association regulations regarding transgender individuals and team and individual sports in schools. It’s tough because we do have a lot to do on the budget frameworks, and I am very nervous about those Alaska administrative code changes. And this one’s a very serious issue too, but as it’s come up in the ASAA meetings and the public meetings of the State Board of Education, it hasn’t impacted athletes.
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?
I think right around 2005 the district had an enrollment of about 5,500 students, and that’s now under 4,000. The only thing that we had done in those two decades is bring on new schools. So that is it is tough, and it is a tricky spot where our costs are going up in our revenue, which is directly a product of enrollment, which is potentially going down.
We did hear from the public that there’s a lot of hopes that we could not do anything for a year, maybe even two years, to allow the icebreaker to port here, bring some families into town.
Unfortunately, the city charter and state statute are very clear that we can’t. We have to present a balanced budget and maintain one. My goal in navigating that moving forward is to make sure that we’re in a better position to deal with things that are going to come up. We heard in December of last year — I don’t think the community’s had enough discussion on this — we received a memo from the Department of Education that says they are targeting Alaska administrative code changes to forbid how Juneau funds supplemental non-instructional items.
They are looking to introduce changes that would make all borough support subject to the disparity test, which is what their main concern is. Here in Juneau, that would be big. All high school activities are funded in that mechanism, food service and transportation, RALLY, those are all partially funded to that mechanism. It’s very scary that we’re up against that and we just need to be informed and ready.
Detail specific accomplishments you (not the board as a whole) achieved on behalf of the Juneau School District.
When I first ran, I ran a two-week write-in campaign because people reached out and I think they were nervous about the candidates, so I didn’t have an agenda. My refrain was I would show up to as many meetings as possible and always do my best.
One of the things I am proud about on a personal level and it’s not anything that deserves fireworks or fanfare, but I take conducting the meetings and rules of procedure and policies, I take that pretty seriously. And one of the things I think that it allows for the community and for the district is to conduct our meetings with respect, even when the issue is difficult.
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’ve been serving Juneau in an appointed or an elected capacity and volunteering for CBJ for the entirety of my adult life, 20 years now. I think it’s part of who I am. I think that Juneau makes it very easy to remember why we do these things. We’re a landlocked town. We are each other. We’ve had times most recently like the jökulhlaup, the floods, COVID, we’ve had some buildings burned down that I think really cement our commitment to each other. And so those things are why I run, right? It isn’t just my love of public meetings that brings me to serve the community. It’s my love of Juneau that is why I do these things.
