Before 33-year-old teacher Dan Whitfield started the current school year, the principal at Goldenview Middle School asked him to decide on a new class and prepare to teach it.
For three years, Whitfield had worked as a band teacher at the school on the Anchorage Hillside. He always taught five classes, but this year he and the rest of the middle school elective teachers within the Anchorage School District would teach for six out of the day's seven periods. The extra class meant they would lose their team planning periods -- all to help achieve a balanced School District budget.
As Whitfield saw it, the elective teachers not only gained more work, they also lost crucial time in which they could collaborate and plan large school events or discuss students' progress across classes.
"I know what I could do last year and I know what I can do this year, and I see a drastic change. That's the frustration," he said on a recent weekday afternoon as students carrying lunch bags bustled into his classroom.
Another frustration: Middle school core curriculum teachers haven't shared the same fate as their elective peers. The core teachers kept their team planning time and continued to teach five classes. This semester, in efforts to reduce class size, the district offered some core teachers additional pay if they took on a sixth class and gave up their personal planning time.
The frustration among elective teachers mounted, and many, including Whitfield, testified at recent Anchorage School Board meetings about the new schedules. Some said they felt singled out. Others said the additional class injected a sizable inequity into the middle school community. For Whitfield, a husband and father of a 2-year-old daughter, the change didn't seem sustainable.
"What it has essentially done is push a tremendous amount of workload to either evenings or before school or weekends," he said.
Andy Holleman, president of the Anchorage Education Association, agrees that while the district required elective teachers to teach an extra class, it did not drop any other expectations.
"No matter how you cut it, the role of the elective teacher has been seriously devalued," he said.
On Thursday, the Anchorage School Board will vote on the budget for the 2015-16 school year. Elective teachers' schedules are expected to arise as an issue that some board members may try to fix -- at least partially.
A lack of funding drove last year's decision to add a class to elective teachers's workload, and it will take money -- roughly $2.4 million -- to get rid of the new requirement, according to Michael Graham, chief academic officer for the Anchorage School District.
But it's not clear just how many board members want to do that.
Board member Tam Agosti-Gisler said Wednesday she will propose an amendment at the meeting that would put 10 of 22 new teacher positions -- which the district has proposed adding next school year -- into middle schools. There, principals would decide how best to allocate the dollars to give elective teachers some relief, though it would not likely eliminate the sixth class.
"Through added staffing, they might be able to be very creative in how they work things out," she said.
Whitfield said the School Board decision could affect his career. Before this year, he said, he never considered leaving Goldenview and moving back to teach at the high school, where he previously worked.
"After being a teacher for 11 years, I can easily say this has been my most challenging year," he said.
Each morning, Whitfield arrives in his classroom at 6:45. Students show up around 7:15 a.m. for jazz band practice, and he leaves his room open during his lunch and planning periods so students can come in and practice during their lunchtimes.
Some days Whitfield's classroom is not absent of students until 3:30 p.m., when after-school practice ends. Each evening, he said, he typically spends two to three hours at home on school work.
"What's really happened is that I just don't have any time during the day to do any planning because if I'm faced with a choice to work with kids or sit in my office and plan my lesson, I'm going to choose the kids every time," he said. "I think they deserve it."
Travis Harrington, a 42-year-old band teacher at Mirror Lake Middle School, said he experiences similar daily constraints.
Without the team planning time, the school's Encore Team -- made up of band, orchestra, choir, piano, applied tech and art teachers -- cannot regularly meet. As a result, they did not have time to plan the annual "Barnes and Noble weekend" this year where students perform at the bookstore. The team usually puts on the school's talent show, but Harrington said he's not sure what will happen this year.
This school year, he said, has felt frantic.
"It's exhausting. It's just really rough," he said. "You want to do the absolute best you can for your kids. I just didn't want to let people down."
The Anchorage School Board is scheduled to discuss and vote on next year's budget at its meeting Thursday that begins at 6:30 p.m.