Juneau Board of Education candidate profile: Steve Whitney

Juneau Board of Education candidate Steve Whitney on Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025. (Jasz Garrett / Juneau Independent)

By Jasz Garrett

Juneau Independent

Steve Whitney: Candidate for one of the three Juneau Board of Education seats

Age: 57

Occupation: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in-season fisheries manager

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: What is your background in education? 

“I have two kids who went to preschool through high school in Juneau schools. Both my parents were elementary school teachers. My dad did a stint as a vice principal and didn’t like it, went back to the classroom. Grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were teachers and some of my cousins are teachers; my sister’s a teacher so it’s something I’ve been around all my life. I’ve seen it from many sides, as a student as well myself. I was on the school board 2016 to ’19.”

Q: What made you want to run back then and why are you interested in doing it again now?

“There are lots of aspects in the district that I was frustrated with. For one thing, they'd have their budget committee, and they'd invite all sorts of people from different parts of the community to come forward and work on a panel to come up with budget priorities, and they’d completely ignore it. Especially in the Gelbrich administration, they did not respond to public comments, or even you'd go and they had a policy where board members weren't allowed to ask questions. I had energy and I had a lot of insights.”

“The last time I stepped down because just after I stepped up, my mom had Alzheimer's, and it just took it out of me. I just didn't have anything left in the tank by the end of that. Now she's passed and both my kids, they're out of the house, they're in different states. I've got time, and it’s just a brutal time for schools in Alaska, so the need is huge. I know how it works and what to do.”

Q: What do you think are the brutal times for schools in Alaska? In your candidate statement, you address state funding and the changes at the federal level.

“The federal level hurts, but the vast majority of the money comes from the state. The state funding is by far the biggest part. And then how much local contribution is available too and what counts, that's going to be enormous.”

“I don't think a lot of people are fully aware that early October, the state board of education is going to meet and consider Dunleavy’s proposed regulation changes. Our budget, people estimate it could be around an $8 million hit to the district, and it could be bigger, it could be smaller. But we don't know, because they're not really being very forthright on how they're going to interpret it. But $8 million, that's more than 10% of our operating budget. A 10% cut on our bare-bones budget — it’s hard to imagine.”

Q: How would you navigate losing that money if the local contribution limitations go into place?

“Absolute first thing, I'm sure our district, other districts, would probably sue. So the first thing would be to head to court and try to stop it and again, see if the Legislature will take it up and stop it. I think there's a very good chance of that because Anchorage is another one of the districts that would get slammed, and there are a lot of legislators from Anchorage, so there's a very good chance that the Legislature might write statute to nullify those regulations, because statues trump regulations.”

Q: What would be the first steps, even to backtrack to right now, since you said you don’t think most people are aware this decision is happening?

“So 90% of our budget goes into salary and benefits for the staff, for the teachers, for the support staff, and administrators. The two important things are smaller class sizes and more staff per student, and that costs a lot of money. So bigger classes, there's an exponential curve. The smaller you get them, the more money you're spending. And then also, quality staff is important as well. And to keep quality staff — and we're not keeping all the staff we need to keep we've lost some of our really good people — you need to compensate them well. So if you're cut with 10% that money's got to either come out of class sizes, or support per student, or comp, or salaries and/or number of teachers. So I'm assuming we'll have union contracts in place before then. I would have liked to have them already, but we don't.”

“If we got an $8 million cut, I’m thinking it would probably just end up with enormous class sizes. We’re required by law to balance the budget and there are caps on how much we can spend.”

Q: I saw in your written application to the board that your priority is to get those union contracts in place. What have you already been doing to address that since negotiations are still ongoing?

“The board's in an interesting place, because the administration and the unions negotiate with each other, right? And then the board has to approve it. And so we're not in the negotiation process. We have to kind of stay hands off to a large extent. We do have influence, but it’s a difficult one and I can’t really go into details.”

Q: Could the role of the board in negotiations be changed? Why or why not?

“The way boards work in the state of Alaska is set up in statute under state law. The way it works isn't for us to choose, that’s for the Legislature and the Constitution, the contracts and the charters there, and the charter at the city.”

Q: But you said it’s your priority, so what does that look like for you then?

“We talk with the administration because the superintendent is our employee, so we prod them, and unfortunately, the money we would like, the resources aren't there, and the unions have legitimate grievances. But with that said, we’re at a cap. As money's gotten tighter, more and more and more of it goes into salary and benefits, and some of those things, the remaining 10%, are things like insurance and heat and electricity, and it's really hard to cut that anymore. The problem is there’s just no more money.”

Q: In your candidate statement, it says you want to do everything you can to stop a class size of 50 kids. Why do you think larger class sizes are a problem?

“I do, but it is a very real danger I think. We could be there with those kind of cuts. It’s big.”

“There's a lot of bad science in education. There's a few really good pieces. There’s the STAR study in Tennessee, with the Legislature. They allocated quite a bit of money to have a randomized study statewide on class sizes. The results are pretty definitive that students fare much better with smaller class sizes, and it's reasonable to extend that to staffing levels as well. And it's pretty well known that there's a lot of research trying to refute that, because it's expensive, but there's almost all those studies that refute it. If you look at the statistically valid studies, we know that class size and staffing levels matter, and we also know that the quality of staff matters, so if you lose your good people, that's another problem too.”

“The entire IT department from when I was on the board, before, is pretty much gone. They've all left for other positions, and there are a lot of teachers that went off to do other things too.”

“But then at the testimony at the last board meeting, people were pointing out how, especially in special education, they were concerned about safety. They're worried about the safety of the staff and the students, and so that's another problem too.”

Q: Do you think the cuts to funding have only exacerbated the issues with special education?

“Yes. Special education is a problem, and my mom taught 50 years ago. It was a problem then, too. She taught in Bellevue, Washington. So when she came back to school, I was the youngest, and she took a few years off when we were all little. When I was early elementary school, she went back to school, and she wasn't a special ed teacher, but that's where they had a shortage, so that's where she ended up. It was brutal and tough and it's still a hard job.”

“As things get tight, we can't pay people, and we can't hire enough special education teachers or paraeducators, and we can't pay them what they need. And then, as a result, class sizes go up, and staffing levels go down. That's all directly related to funding.”

“Special education is always a hard thing to fill. It's a hard job. I think as everybody's aware, we're having trouble filling a lot of those positions and just not having the resources that we need overall. In some areas, it's hitting harder than others, and especially the places where even in good times where it's hard to find people, that's where it's hitting the hardest. So special education is particularly difficult.”

Q: How do you plan to address the recruitment and retention issues in the school district?

“The easiest way would be able to actually have adequate funding where we can pay people competitive wages. I mean, that's the first step. So Lyle, the HR director now, he wants to work with the state and the universities to make it easier to get people to come in from other professions, and become teachers and actually be able to do it, get their certification, get their years of student teaching while on the job. I know there are a lot of people who would be willing to do that, especially people near retirement or people with young kids. I know there are people out there who would be willing to jump in. It would require shifts in some of the requirements of the degree program.”

“The administration has started outreach to the university and that's something I wholeheartedly support, any new pathway to get teachers in. Some of these are really good people who I think would make wonderful teachers.”

Q: But then how do you get them to stay?

“Burnout is tough. An obvious one is going back to a defined benefits retirement system, that would sure help.”

“The real sticking point, ultimately, is we just don't have enough overall resources. So different unions negotiate between how much salary and how much they get in benefits. But there's a limit to the total package. And really the big sticking point, the big problem is the amount available for the total package is too small. It's smaller than it should be.”

Q: Is advocating at the state level something you could be a part of as a board member?

“When you’re in the administration, and this is true for my professional job with the feds, it's illegal for me to push members of Congress for things that relate to my job. And the administration has the same thing, but board members are very different animals. 

We're publicly elected officials representing the community, and we have the full ability, and I think, the obligation, to lobby the Legislature either through newspaper articles or actually talking to our individual legislators or other legislators. It's part of our job to advocate for the schools on behalf of the community.”

Q: How can you help teachers and the support staff feel heard?

“The site council is a wonderful thing. Every school should have a school board member there that goes and updates the teacher. There's a certain number of teachers always present there. And that's always a good tool, going to the schools and talking to teachers. What's really important is to listen to teachers. First of all, they're in the schools more than anybody else, so it's important for us to listen to them and kind of pick their brains and let them let us know what's happening and how things are working.”

“But also, it's important to have the communication go both ways. It's very important for us to be honest with the realities of where we are. I think with the pandemic and the consolidation, there are a lot of people, and for good reason, they're a little gun-shy of actually going out and engaging, just because it's been so hostile. So I think I'm coming in after all that, I think it'll make it a little easier for me because I don’t have all that recent trauma.”

Q: How do you feel the consolidation plan is going now that it has been a year?

“It seems to be working out better now. It shouldn't have been the way it happened, the way it did. If we're going to consolidate, it should have been a multi-year process thought out ahead of time. We ended up in a budget crisis where the money just wasn't there, and it had to go fast. That's never a good situation, and it made a difficult process. It was always going to be difficult, no matter how it was done, but the way it ended up happening so quick made it a whole lot worse. My sense is it seems to be going well; it seems like students are handling it better than a lot of the adults. Most of the comments I hear from students is they like it. They like having one school. They like being there with their friends, and they like the greater opportunities. You get a lot of comments from adults who are bitter and they're not ready to move on.”

Q: What about student activities? That was a concern last year, with sports in particular.

“Activities are really, really, really important. It's inevitable when you do a consolidation like this, there will be some winners and losers. So if you want to be on the basketball team, there's only half as many spots on a varsity team. On the other hand, if you're not going for the super competitive activities, there are more options too. So that's what I mean by there are winners: there's more opportunities for some kids. There are going to be cases where kids don't get to do what they want to do.”

“The bottom line for activities is how many resources you have, and activities are super important. Iceland pioneered this. They had a huge delinquency problem, and they did basically a nationwide experiment, which you can do in a closed nation of 300,000 people in the middle of the ocean. Everybody was pretty much required to be in something like soccer or drama. And the turnaround of the national mood, it was pretty dramatic. They’re the ones who showed how important activities are. Classes are where you learn stuff, and activities are where you actually learn how to do stuff. So you either build robots or you work as a team, but you do something, you don't get graded, and you actually do it. And both of those are important.”

Q: What are your thoughts on the new cellphone ban policy? The motion to establish the new policy, effective this school year, passed 4-2 in June, with you and Amber Frommherz in opposition.

“People prefer a simple solution. And I think this is the simple solution that's got people's attention right now. There's not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. And my youngest, he was outraged when he heard it because cellphones are how he took notes. He didn't write down equations from textbooks when he found something important; he’d just take a picture and keep it. There's a lot of people when they work in group projects, they collaborate, and a lot of teachers actually use cellphones as part of the curriculum.”

“But another problem I have with it is I think students need to be able to communicate freely and privately with each other. I think that's really an important part of being a human being is to communicate with people. And if they have to use just the school's resources, there's monitoring software, and the right to privacy is very much taken away. I took an oath to uphold the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment has the right to privacy to your person in effect. Your communications with other people is a part of that.”

“Another reason I'm opposed to it is people are going to have problems, they're going to make mistakes, but people need to learn how to do that before they're 18. You can’t just withhold all that for them and then expect them to all of a sudden, when they aren't on their own, without supervision, to suddenly know how to do things. I think it should be up to the individual teachers in their classroom. So there are multiple reasons why I was opposed to it.”

“Also, if you teach people to not have their own individuality, if you control people too much until they're 18, then let them go, you're going to condition them to accept being controlled. And I don't think that's healthy for our democracy. I think people need to learn how to exercise their rights as soon as possible. We need to start letting students have more self-control and self-determination. And so bans like this really make me cringe, because I don't like controlled societies. That's not a society I want to live in.”

Q: What long-term planning do you think the school board should consider, given the future circumstances of the homeporting of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Storis in the coming years?

“I know some people think that our school population is going to increase with the Storis being ported here, and it'll help, but I think we're still in for declines, and we definitely need to work close with the state demographers. It’s hard for them, I think, to predict how big an impact the Storis will make. But we definitely need to consult with the popular demographic experts as much as possible and and make sure we have as good an idea as possible. Coast Guard is an important issue. Generally, they spend a few years here, and then they're forced to transfer. Even without the Storis, there's a lot of Coast Guard kids in Juneau.”

“When I was on before, we started basically a consultation with the Coast Guard here in Juneau to to see what the school district can do to make things easier for the Coast Guard families. That's something we need to continue and probably step it up a little more too.”

“If we can make our schools better, if we can get a administration, and they'll fully fund it, that'll actually help us, because Coast Guard families do have some ability when they have kids, to choose where they're stationed. There is a little bit of influence there. And if you're in a place where people want their kids to be in school, you'll get more kids. And we desperately need more kids.”

Q: On this topic of families, what are your thoughts on the privatization and uncertain future of the RALLY program?

“That's a tough one, and I can't speak very much about it, because there's a lawsuit on that one. I can speak in generalities that childcare is a huge issue, whether it's in the school district, the city or others, it's definitely something that needs to be expanded whenever we get the chance.”

Q: If you were faced with the decision to keep federal funding or eliminate DEI, what would you do in that situation?

“It depends on what’s being asked. If it's minor adjustments to curriculum, I might just hold my nose for a couple years. If they were asking us to disband the Tlingit language and Tlingit programs, that would be a non-starter. Federal funding isn't nearly as big an issue as the state

funding.”

“We had $440,000 held to make sure we weren't being anti-Semitic and then they backed down. The federal Department of Education withheld funds and Juneau’s portion of that was $440,000 – basically, four teachers’ worth. And then we had to have a special meeting, because we had staff who we didn't want to lose who were partially funded by that, and so we had to allocate money so we didn't have to fire people…But then the funding came through. It wasn't held for very long. It was just two or three weeks, or a month, and and then they backed down.”

“One thing when I was on the board last time at the National School Board conference, I realized there was this data set that the universities compiled, the National Student Clearinghouse data, where they keep track of where all the kids go and from which high school they're from, and how well they do if they graduate. We have a ton of really detailed information, and I found it just before my term was up. Then I wasn't going to run for another term. But Bridget Weiss promised me that she would make that information public to the extent some of it's confidential because some of its individual students, but you can lump the general information, and then three months later, the pandemic hit. So I don't begrudge her for not following through on that because she had a lot of stuff to deal with.”

“But what we do know is that, at least in 2019 data, 60% of our students went to college, only 30% graduated, and of our Native population, 50% went to college, but only 10% graduated from college...You can say that it's wrong to give special attention to the Native population — you have to treat everybody the same. But I think to let that go would be discriminating against them. I think we have to take that seriously. We have to do what we can.”

“The first step to seriously addressing it is just to make people aware that it's a problem and it's there, and that's why I think it's important to release that to the public...There are kind of two schools of thought from the last time I was on the board. One was, you get all the problems, you put out there in public, and you address them, and then there's also certain board members who didn't want to say anything negative. They just wanted to be cheerleaders and keep morale up. There is some validity in that. If everybody's always angry, it makes it harder to do stuff. But I tend to follow more in the prior camp, where I want to look at the problems. I want to make it public and I want to address those problems.”

Q: Do you think Alaska Native language curriculum and programming is important? Why or why not? 

“It's definitely important. I was on the board that actually approved the Tlingit revitalization (Tlingit Language and Literacy) program, and there were three of us who were in favor of that.”

“One of the things I worked really hard at those board meetings was to make it just really politically difficult for other people to vote against it, because there are some people who didn't want it, and some were on the fence. My job was to convince all the people on the fence to go on with it. And I was successful. We implemented it. And then I was on the committee to implement it, and I had ideas of how it should work, and that was based on experiences in Europe and how they teach English. Some people were very clear that it's not learning a foreign language, it's revitalizing an existing language. I felt that it wasn't my position to impose my thoughts on that. There's a time where there's things we should do, and there's a time where you just want to step aside, let the stakeholders take over. And that was one of those. So I stepped down from the TCLL subcommittee once we got the program in place, because I didn't feel good. That was one of those situations where you support it, and then once it's in place, the best thing for me to do was step back and let them take it over and run with it.”

“But yes, I do firmly believe that we need to expand Tlingit language...It was forcibly removed, and the language was forcibly suppressed, and until they get that back, there's always going to be hard feelings, and it's always going to be problematic.”

“It’s hard because we’ve got to focus on that, but also, the fact that only 10% of them are graduating from college. We need to improve that too. One of my favorite Tlingit speakers, Rosita Worl, came to talk to us and she was very adamant that’s something they need to focus on. Education is just super important for Tlingit communities. To be proud of your heritage and who you are it makes a difference in how you function.”

“One thing that really struck me while I was on the board was when we put up the monument at Sayéik Gastineau and we augmented the name of Gastineau for Sayéik, because we discovered there were the graves, and we put up the totem. But during that, I ended up reading through a lot of the history behind what happened in Douglas and I had no idea, I mean, that we'd burnt down the village over there. It was a certain group of people, but the fact that nobody in the community overall understood that or knew about it. I've been here for almost two decades, and it was like a shock to hear this.”

“I understand why there are those hard feelings, and that's one of the reasons we need to bring back Tlingit language and culture programs: we have to validate that. We have to validate them, because what happened is wrong and it's got to be rectified.”

Q: How would you bridge your past experience on the school board with now, when so much has changed?

“There are some things that it's really a huge advantage of being on before. A lot of what the school board does, it's prescribed by laws and regulations and things we have to do. And I'm very familiar with all that. None of that has changed. We have to make our list of maintenance projects and submit them to the state by a certain date. They're not going to give us money to do any of them, but there's still things like that. We have to approve curriculum, we have to go through the budget.”

“There's a lot of things that are completely different. I know and understand a lot of the process, but in some ways, the world in the schools are very different now than they were before the pandemic. I'm still learning.”

“What I think a lot of people don't understand is there's an awful lot of things you just have to do. It's kind of like any job. There's just a lot of routines that have to be done every single day. And the school board's the same way. There's lots of things that at the school board is required to do by the city charter, by statute, and by regulation.”

Q: What else would you like voters to know about why you're running for school board and what you hope to achieve?

“Schools are in a hard spot, and what I really want to do is survive for at least two more years until we get a new governor in place and we aren't governed by veto overrides and lawsuits. I think I'm a good person to help us survive and keep us as whole as possible through that phase.”

• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.