OPINION: Anchorage School District shouldn’t ignore public’s rejection of Inlet View rebuild

Anchorage voters already rejected the Inlet View expansion proposal in April. Some are now advocating that we ignore the voters and knock Inlet View down and replace it with a $34.3 million, $742 per square foot — $170,000 per student — major school expansion project, 42% larger than the existing campus. Worse yet, the money currently being considered to fund the rejected project was intended for property tax relief.

This expansion proposal has exceptionally bad timing because Anchorage School District, or ASD, is simultaneously considering retiring six schools in other neighborhoods, reflecting the dramatic drop in enrollment across the district.

Anchorage has an enormous quantity of excess schools — and maintaining them is robbing resources from classrooms. Current projections are that the student population in five years in ASD brick-and-mortar schools will be 5,000 fewer students than 1978, when the district’s building footprint was at least 2.9 million square feet smaller than today. To visualize 2.9 million square feet, it’s more floor space than all current ASD high schools combined, plus six elementary schools.

Inlet View Elementary may be old by the standards of our very young city, built in 1957, with expansions in 1972 and 1985, but my granddaughters currently attend a very effective neighborhood elementary school in Portland that was last expanded in 1925. Well-maintained public buildings don’t “wear out.” The White House was built in 1800. Replacing functional buildings because they’re “old” is a luxury we cannot currently afford. There’s plenty of school capacity downtown. Inlet View is surrounded by half a dozen campuses operating far below capacity. Downtown already has the Chugach Optional program and the renovated and expanded campus at Denali Elementary. A much more urgent concern than an expansion project in a favored neighborhood is addressing ASD’s $824 million deferred maintenance backlog.

Some have argued that Inlet View is overcrowded. By Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, or DEED, standards, the campus has the capacity for 257 students with a projected enrollment of 203 students or less, by the time the project could be completed. For context, the very popular Winterberry Charter School has less than half the current floorspace of Inlet View, with a student population of 226 kids — and a waiting list to get in.

In 2012, ASD changed its local Education Specification, which now puts Inlet View at a capacity of 170 students — without any changes to the building. Since the change, Inlet View has chosen to consistently exceed its new capacity limitation by allowing zone exemptions for dozens of students from outside the neighborhood. Adding insult to the proposal to override of the rejected Inlet View project, the dollars being considered for this project are funds allocated by the Legislature to aid in property tax relief. For several years, bond debt reimbursement from the state was suspended and property taxpayers had to shoulder the full burden of bonds passed. In 2022, the Legislature allocated an amount equal to the extra burden taxpayers bore during the suspension of bond debt reimbursement. The Mat-Su Borough has already indicated that it will be giving their property taxpayers a one-mill tax rebate with its portion of the same legislative allocation, despite their growing student population.

Funding the rejected Inlet View expansion project, with money intended for taxpayers, while we’re closing other schools and continue to have an enormous maintenance backlog, is a very bad idea. And more importantly, every dollar misallocated on unnecessary capital projects is a dollar not available for intensive reading instruction, career and technology programs, language immersion, gifted and talented enrichment, sports programs, and a wide variety of classroom operations popular with parents and students.

There’s a process for major construction projects. That process involves consulting the voters who will be responsible for paying for the maintenance of the projects. If the voters feel they are being ignored or disrespected in that process, it may become very difficult to pass future bond measures needed to address the ongoing ASD facilities debacle.

Bob Griffin is a Senior Education Research Fellow for Alaska Policy Forum and a member of its board of directors. He’s a retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and former Chair of the Budget Advisory Commission for the Municipality of Anchorage and the Anchorage School District and a current member of the Alaska State Board of Education and Early Childhood Development.

Correction: An initial version of this column, published online, included an incorrect value for the Mat-Su Borough’s planned tax rebate; the rebate is planned as a one-mill ($0.001 per dollar of assessed value) tax reduction.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.