As the April 5 city election approaches, Anchorage School Board candidates are engaging in a sometimes lively discussion of questions such as: Are we overbuilding schools? Are administrative costs over the top?
Two of the seven School Board seats are on the ballot. Three candidates are competing for Seat C and four for Seat D. The board members are elected citywide.
It's hard for them to get attention in a low-key race, and only two candidates in each race have enough financial backing to make their voices widely heard before the election.
For School Board Seat C, that's incumbent Pat Higgins and challenger Bob Griffin.
Seat D has no incumbent but features lawyer Treg Taylor and former legislator Gretchen Guess as the well-funded candidates. A teacher and a food service worker fill out the field.
Seat C: THE CHALLENGERS
Griffin, a commercial airline pilot, is putting on a full-bore campaign and contributed $19,000 of his own money to do it.
"We need to focus on classrooms," he said at a candidate forum this week at the Fairview Recreation Center. "We spend too much on expensive buildings and administration."
He opposes tenure, a system that makes it harder to fire teachers. "In my opinion it doesn't contribute to the potential for a better outcome for students," he said in an interview.
He supports public alternative and charter schools, and also a proposal to have school districts administer public scholarship funds that parents could use to pay for private schools.
It's Griffin's second run for the School Board, and he's made other political forays. He co-sponsored a successful 2009 ballot initiative on the city's tax cap, with a goal of strengthening the cap and lowering property taxes.
Last year, he worked on behalf of Joe Miller's Republican U.S. Senate campaign, though he said he disapproves of the way Miller delayed conceding at the end.
The third candidate is Dustin Darden, who has registered as exempt from state financial reporting requirements, meaning he is raising little if any money. He is running to "encourage reading of the Holy Bible," he said in response to Daily News written questions.
THE INCUMBENT
Higgins, a career human relations executive and the incumbent for Seat C, said he's helped steer the district toward more vocational education and toward a budget system that links services with costs so people can see what dollars are accomplishing. He has served since 2008.
The district is moving in a good direction, he said. While other candidates call for administrative cuts, the district did in fact save more than $1 million on administration costs in the next school budget, Higgins said.
The dropout rate is declining, and graduation rates are increasing, he said.
The board has taken a bigger role in setting overall direction this past year, partly due to his suggestions, Higgins said.
The biggest problem facing schools is that 40 percent of children entering kindergarten are not adequately prepared, he said. The district needs to do a better job of catching them up, he said.
Another project he wants to see through: A better system "to measure how well children are doing in individual classrooms. ... We've got to find out what's working."
SEAT D: THE FOUR-WAY RACE
In the Seat D School Board race, all four candidates are actively campaigning.
The heavyweights, the candidates advertising to get their messages out, are Guess, a former legislator who is regional business director for Providence Health and Services Alaska; and Taylor, an in-house lawyer for McKinley Capital Management, a global money management firm.
The other two, David Nees, a Hanshew Middle School teacher, and Roman Romanovski, a Bear Tooth food service worker, have told the Alaska Public Offices Commission they are not raising enough money to require a report.
Nees offers a teacher's perspective, saying, for example, that the elementary math program the district uses is "horrible."
Romanovski says as the youngest candidate -- a 2001 graduate of Chugiak High -- he'd be better able to address student concerns.
SPENDING HIS OWN MONEY
Taylor put $30,000 of his own money into the campaign. A self-described conservative, he decided to run at the last minute when he heard another conservative had dropped out, he said. "I figured if I'm going to run, I might as well run for real."
Several of his campaign talking points are similar to Griffin's. He describes administration as "bloated," and says, "We've built museum-like schools." Money should be redirected from those two areas into classrooms, he says.
In the Fairview forum Tuesday night, he decried the teacher tenure system. "If you look at the goal to provide the best education for children, you can't support tenure," he said. "It's just unacceptable to have bad teachers."
One of the biggest problems in the district is "lack of personal accountability at every level, including the School Board, administration, teachers, parents and students," Taylor said, answering a Daily News question.
Anchorage taxpayers have been generous, he said, but, "The rate of increase (for spending) is alarming."
Taylor's two elementary-school aged children attend Northern Lights ABC School, a public alternative school, and he supports alternative and charter schools. He said he supports the idea of vouchers, too, in which parents could spend public money on private schools.
THE FORMER LEGISLATOR
Guess's school-aged child also attends a public alternative school -- Rilke Schule Charter, a German immersion school. She says the district needs to figure out how to provide transportation to alternative schools to make choices within the public system feasible for more families.
Guess calls herself a moderate.
The district's biggest problem, she said, is "the unsustainable growth in the budget whose expenses are not articulated or understood by the residents and taxpayers."
"I'm an economist by training," she said. "I want to sit down and solve problems."
She served in the state House from 2001 to 2003, and the Senate from 2003 to 2007.
One piece of legislation she worked on was the high school exit exam, which Alaskan students must pass to graduate. Her role, she said, was "bringing in the voice of kids with learning disabilities" into the debate so those students could get some modifications to the testing.
She also helped solidify funding for the Alaska Military Youth Academy that allowed it to expand.
And she said she's proud of the general way she served constituents.
She left the Legislature to keep her family together in one town.
Reach Rosemary Shinohara at rshinohara@adn.com or 257-4340.
KSKA public radio and KAKM public television will host Anchorage Assembly candidates 7-9 p.m. Monday and School Board candidates 7-8 p.m. Tuesday.
School Board Seat D candidates answer questions
By ROSEMARY SHINOHARA
rshinohara@adn.com