This article has been moved in front of the Juneau Empire’s paywall.
Jenny Thomas: Juneau Board of Education candidate
Age: 46
Occupation: Business owner
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 that teachers and students are doing remarkably well. I think that they’re resilient and teachers are going to put their best effort forward because they’re there for the kids.
However, is it functioning correctly and most efficiently? Absolutely not. I know that there’s class sizes that are over 30-plus kids. There’s a class at JD where my daughter was going that they had to leave the class the first day of school and go down to the computer lab because they were over capacity for the room that the class was slated to be in.
You said where your daughter was going — is she not going to JD anymore?
She’s going to take two classes at JD, and then she’s going to do homeschool and do university courses.
What she needs for academics and to be challenged are not being provided there. I mean, there’s a lot of AP classes that you can’t get into because there’s a waitlist.
If you had been on the school board when the extent of the district’s financial crisis was revealed in January, what would you have done differently in terms of process and what you voted on?
I would have acknowledged the emails from the JEA president letting them know that their health insurance numbers were incorrect, which would have lessened the deficit and alarm number to the public. I would have done a more thorough survey and assessment, and I would have probably worked to find a way to give us a little bit more time to further evaluate how to move forward.
What would you have done if there was extra time?
I would have looked at some of the prior studies that the district had already done and to my knowledge, they had been talking about consolidation early in the spring because they knew the numbers were going to be low. So I would probably revisit whatever we talked about then and maybe sought advice from other districts on how they were moving forward.
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 as the top non-budget priorities if you are on the board after the Oct. 1 election?
It literally dominated everything. I know of things that aren’t happening, but they probably aren’t happening because the budget was dominating the entire thing: recruitment for teachers, what the next year is going to look like, electives.
The reconsolidation changed the entire school district set up in every single school, not just high school and middle school, because those closed, but every elementary school was affected. I think pretty much everything was overlooked.
The top priorities are going to be looking to see what’s working and what’s not working. What students need a little extra help? From what I hear, there’s class sizes that are extremely large. There’s kids that don’t have periods. We’re having trouble recruiting teachers. So my concern is going to be the fallout from that.
How do we help the kids whose parents aren’t screaming very loud and making sure they don’t fall through the cracks?Because the parents that are screaming loud, those kids probably are going to be okay because they have someone fighting for them. But it’s the kids that are going to fall through the crack that are my main concern.
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 don’t think challenging that decision is a good idea. I think if you’re looking at what’s going on nationally, it’s kind of reversing. I think that’s not something the school district should be concerned with, in my opinion.
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?
We need to be proactive. There’s a lot coming down our way that we need to be looking at. We don’t know if we’re going to get a BSA increase next year for the following budget.
Contract negotiations are coming up for JEHS and JSSA, which are probably going to include a raise for everyone. Then, not to mention that we’re going to be losing state funding because we did close a high school. Plus the new contract of the superintendent, all those things are going to be huge factors in our budget.
If we get more kids from the icebreaker that want to come to Juneau, my hope would be that we could make it so they actually want to enroll their kids in school and not homeschool them through a separate program.
I’m using IDEA, I’m not using HomeBRIDGE because I can’t get a call back. There’s many people that haven’t got their kids in homeschool from HomeBRIDGE yet because they’re swamped. They’ve just been overwhelmed.
I think that there’s yes, a decline in the population, but I think if you really look at the numbers, you’re going to see that IDEA, Raven and Faith’s communities numbers have skyrocketed. Not just this year, but in the previous years. And there’s a reason for that, and we need to address that and fix that problem because we want the kids coming out of the school district to be the future citizens of Juneau.
What specific accomplishments do you believe you can achieve as an individual if elected to the board?
I think that I can bring the appreciation for a diverse opinion to the board. I appreciate people that have a different opinion and I can have a respectful difference of opinion. And I think that that is healthy. So I plan to bring basically my personality, that what you see is what you get.
I’m more than happy to work with somebody. From a diverse conversation, you’re going to come up with a creative solution, right? If everybody thinks the same, why do we have a board? So I’m hopefully going to be unique and be able to voice my concerns.
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 am running because I feel like it’s the right thing to do. I feel like I have learned too much to ignore and not do anything. My kid’s going to be out in two years. It’s a three-year term, right? But I have friends’ kids that are just starting kindergarten.
Even if you don’t have kids, what goes into the school district comes out on our streets. Do we want people dropping out? No. We don’t want to increase the homeless population in Juneau. We want to prevent that. And I think that starts with the foundation of a great education.
