Anchorage School District reduces proposed school closures to 4, for the end of this year

Leaders of the Anchorage School District said Wednesday that they will shrink their proposed “rightsizing” plan that originally called for shuttering seven elementary schools over the course of three years.

Instead, under the revised proposal, four schools would be closed and on a shorter time frame — in May 2025, at the end of the current school year.

The four that are still slated for potential closure are Baxter, Lake Hood and Nunaka Valley elementary schools in Anchorage, and Fire Lake Elementary in Eagle River, ASD Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said in a prepared statement midday Wednesday.

The three facilities removed from the proposed closure list are Bear Valley, Tudor and Wonder Park elementary schools.

“For the past several weeks, the ASD leadership team has gathered valuable feedback from the community, helping guide further analysis of the buildings initially recommended for rightsizing,” Bryantt wrote.

After the original school closure proposal was put forward by the district Nov. 1, opposition from parents, students and some quarters of the community was fierce. The seven schools on the initial list serve approximately 1,300 students, all of whom would be shifted into other schools once their facilities closed.

“Significant amounts of school staff and community feedback informed the Administration’s decision to remove three schools from the initial list of seven schools that were initially recommended for closure,” Bryantt wrote in a memo submitted to the school board, also signed by Chief Operating Officer Jim Anderson and Chief Academic Officer Sven Gustafson.

The district plans to repurpose each of the buildings at the four schools on the updated closure list to serve existing charter schools, Bryantt wrote in the memo.

[Previously: Anchorage School Board still ‘wide open’ on proposed school closures]

The district says the changes are necessary to contend with massive financial shortcomings and a shrinking student population in the municipality.

According to school district officials, there are 6,453 fewer students attending Anchorage schools now than there were in 2010, a contraction of 13%.

“This decline is the result of general out-migration in the Anchorage Municipality coupled with a decline in birth rates across the city,” according to the district’s memo. Simultaneously, more students and families are enrolling in homeschool programs, “which further reduced the number of students who receive instruction in the District’s school buildings each day.”

Three schools have been closed in the last several years, two of them on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, along with Abbott Loop Elementary in 2023.

“The District’s limited resources are not robust enough to meet the needs of all students, and this strain is especially apparent in very small schools,” Bryantt wrote in the district’s memo. “Though the District recognizes the advantages to having small schools, the State does not support the resources needed for the District to provide the same academic levels of service to all schools.”

The three elementary schools removed from the closure plan were spared for different reasons, according to Bryantt’s memo. Vacant classrooms at Bear Valley Elementary are on track for expanded child care use, meeting “facility repurpose efforts”; plans for where Tudor Elementary students would relocate if their school closed faced logistical hurdles that made the recommendation for closure “unsupportable”; and further analysis indicated that Wonder Park, initially selected for enrollment and design reasons, could have its capacity fully utilized if it absorbed all of Nunaka Valley’s pre-kindergarten classrooms, Bryantt said in the memo.

One rationale for dropping the timeline from three years to one was “to reduce the impact to morale for schools.” District and school board officials have also said that a key part of successfully transitioning students out of Abbott Loop before it fully closed was investing time in preparing them for the change to a new facility.

“With a smaller number of schools affected, the District can effectively support the transition of the four closing schools in one year,” Bryantt wrote in the memo.

The modified proposal will go before the Anchorage School Board during a work session on Dec. 3. The school board’s vote on whether or how to implement the plan could take place as soon as Dec. 17.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.