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Q&A: New superintendent navigates three challenges
Juneau School District’s budget, enrollment and staffing are top of mind for Superintendent Shawn Arnold
By Jasz Garrett
Juneau Independent
The Juneau Independent conducted this interview on Aug. 18. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
In a new office but a familiar school, Shawn Arnold stepped into his role as Juneau School District's superintendent this year.
Arnold says the district has three major challenges: the budget, declining student enrollment, and staff shortages. He became superintendent in July after six years with the Juneau School District, most recently as principal of Thunder Mountain Middle School. For more than 20 years, Arnold has held other teaching and administrative positions in Alaska, including superintendent of Valdez City Schools and Nome Public Schools. He moved to Alaska in 1994 after military college and was on active duty in both the U.S. Army and Air Force until 2017.
“It's not about titles. It's not about a salary; it's about service, and kind of giving back to the community that is my home,” Arnold said during a public meet-and-greet in March.
Q: What are you looking forward to about your new role?
A: I think it's just giving back to the community in a different way than I have served. I've served individual buildings, but this is an opportunity I get to serve the whole community. And it's exciting because Juneau is where I consider home, and it's a place that I care deeply about. And it just gives me a way to give back in a different manner.
Q: What has your role entailed between being selected as superintendent this spring and the first week of school?
A: Refreshing on overall district policies, agreements that we have with partner agencies, reviewing the budget, where we have our staffing needs, also any kind of status of works in progress from curriculum adoption, instructional program implementation, to building maintenance repairs….There's a lot of operations that go on behind the scenes that I've been learning about.
Q: Was there anything that surprised you while learning the background and behind the scenes?
A: I think the biggest surprise coming into the role is just how dynamic things are, how many partnerships and relationships there are. Just for example, our partnership with the city encompasses many different offices and departments, from engineering to youth services. I just had a meeting recently with our Teen Health representative, who is supported through the city.
Q: The district is facing staffing shortages going into the school year. Do you have any ideas on how to improve recruitment?
A: One of the things that I learned speaking with staff, speaking with stakeholders over the past few months is I learned about the three challenges — I'm calling them the three challenges that the school district is facing this upcoming school year and probably beyond.
That's our budget: remaining financially solvent to support all the resources we need for students. Our enrollment has been declining. That's another challenge. But also, most importantly, is recruiting and retaining effective educators. Not just our classroom teachers, but our paraeducators, our support staff, our administrators. That’s one of the big challenges.
The scary thing is it's not just something that Juneau is facing. It's something every community in our state is facing. They're also dealing with budgets, declining enrollments, and also the recruiting and retaining staff. It’s a national issue.
As far as retaining and recruiting staff for Juneau, what we know is there are challenges to bringing in people from outside the community. The biggest challenge I think all of us face is housing shortages for affordable, adequate housing.
If we hire a teacher from out of state, which might be a little bit easier, they might be hesitant to move to Juneau because of the lack of housing.
Part of it is looking within our community, creating pipelines, encouraging our current staff if they work with us in our schools — and they may not be teachers — to provide them support for a pathway to become a teacher. So we can build a pool of applicants for teachers into principals, maybe paraeducators into teachers.
And looking beyond, it's probably not out of the realm of possibility to look at opportunities developing our high school students — a pathway that supports them in college so that they could come back and teach here in our community.
Q: Do you think the school district could offer new classes or programs to foster ‘growing your own?’
A: I think we could, and we currently right now have something called Educators Rising at JDHS (Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé). It's a statewide program, and it's like a club with some classes added into it for high school students who are considering teaching as a profession. And the club model is supported statewide through an office at the university system. And they're looking at making some revisions in the coming year to Educators Rising to encourage and make it easier for students to access the classes and the activities, and hopefully want to go into the teaching profession later on.
Q: You went through the consolidation firsthand as a principal (transitioning from Thunder Mountain High School to Thunder Mountain Middle School) — what adjustments and support do you still see necessary as the district enters its third school year under the consolidation plan?
A: We've improved on and figured some things out along the way, and I think the biggest thing is just to make sure to continue to support our educators in the models that we currently have in place, and just further refinement.
There's a lot of work that's been done, especially at our high school with dual enrollment and dual credit offerings. We're looking at some possible expansion of CTE (Career and Technical Education) offerings in unique fashions, working with partners. But this is where the goal, too, is to make things more efficient. And I think that we're on the right track.
Q: You mentioned the budget as one of the three challenges — what fiscal challenges do you see continuing, and how would you respond to requests from the community for more financial transparency?
A: I think a lot of the steps have been done as far as including and giving the community an opportunity during the budget development process, so that they know all the steps — where the money goes, where it comes from, allowing them to see how the process works. And I think it's really important to give them that opportunity to attend sessions, and so for us that's communicating this fall a reasonable timeline to develop the budget.
At the end of the day, for us as a school district, we put together a balanced budget that we present to the school board to adopt and the revenues have to match the expenditures. And the biggest challenge — it's not so much a local challenge as far as our budgets — it's that sometimes we never know how much money we're going to receive from the state, where most of our money comes from.
And the hope would be someday that we have forward-funded education, where by the time we present the budget for adoption by the school board, we know for certain how much money we're going to receive from the state.
But it does change from year to year, and it puts us in a difficult situation because we also have to hire staff for the next school year, and that takes place for us before the summertime. But we may not know until late in the summer how much money for certain we'll receive from the state.
The hope, though, is that we have forward-funded funding, so we know well in advance from the state how much money we'll have to operate within a budget.
That's the most challenging aspect, I think, for school districts. When the state experiences good times or bad times financially, just knowing how much we have to work within our budget is the biggest thing.
Our year-to-year tied to the enrollment is also a big factor as well, and we've consistently had a declining enrollment over the past few years here in Juneau. And with that, the funding formula is fewer students — there's less funding, and so it's working within our budget that we do receive.
Q: Can you expand more on the issue of declining student enrollment in Juneau? How do you plan to address this?
A: The declining enrollment is something we're seeing in Juneau, but it's something we're seeing statewide. Families are having fewer kids, so it's just kind of a natural progression.
Alaska as a whole has seen a net loss in population. Our demographics have slowly kind of shifted and we've seen fewer people stay in the state overall, and Juneau is not immune to that. And so we're just seeing fewer students. And the way that we have to adjust for that is how we're utilizing our resources: how we're structuring our classes, how many teachers in each building, if we need to make adjustments in the way we deliver programs.
Even things in the future as far as our school boundaries. Like where exactly our neighborhood boundaries for neighborhood elementary schools — our six neighborhood elementary schools — where they may be. Because we've seen fewer kids in one area and more kids in another area, and so we have a little bit of a mismatch. And the boundaries haven't been redrawn in almost about 30 years.
And so areas outside of the (Mendenhall) Valley, close to the Valley, where we've had more housing built over the past 30 years — there's more kids. There's fewer families in some areas, such as the downtown area, so where we used to have more kids, we have fewer kids there. There's just some things that we haven't kept up with as far as demographic shifts within the community. So we see areas to address in the coming years.
Q: So you eventually intend to redistribute which students go to which school districtwide based on where they live?
A: Myself working with the school board will probably be addressing this over the year or over the years; it will be a long-term process.
Q: You talked about challenges that the state's facing as a whole when it comes to education and then in Juneau, with the housing shortage being a factor. Are there also past decisions by school administration that you think have factored into a loss of staff?
A: I don't think so. I think people want to move here to work. I didn't think as much about a job as wanting to come live here in Juneau, and I was just excited that I was able to come and work for the school district. And that's often what we see is that. When we look at recruitment and retention there are always areas for improvement. And often we're tied to what we can offer in resources to support folks and what they would like. But I think, as a state, the state decisions over the past 20 years have impacted our local recruitment. We see it especially with our retirement package that the state adopted. That's an area that has impacted, I think, our recruitment of educators locally, but also statewide.
Q: Is there anything you would have done differently as superintendent during the last Juneau Education Association union's contract negotiation cycle?
A: It’s really hard to say. I wasn’t in the shoes of others. But this is a contract year, or a negotiation year again with the teachers’ union. And so, sooner rather than later, we're going to be entering into negotiations. I have my own approach, having gone through negotiations as a superintendent in my past, and it's really relationship-based. It's trying to work together in a collaborative process.
Q: During your time as superintendent in Nome and Valdez, did you have to address similar fiscal and enrollment challenges like JSD is now?
A: We didn’t see the challenges happening as rapidly as they have been, but we were also dealing with declining enrollment even back seven to 10 years ago in both of those districts, we had that as a challenge. The budget — often with the state side, in education — I often call it feast or famine. Because when I started in 2014, oil was about $130 a barrel. It wasn’t long after that, maybe a year after, it dropped down at one point to about $30 a barrel, so then that meant less contribution from the state. There was less of an increase there in the Base Student Allocation, the funding formula.
And it meant we had to learn how to develop a district budget there with reduced funding. Years later, during COVID time, we were in a good place there. We were receiving a lot of funding. Federal funding and stuff came to help support us, and so often it's a feast-or-famine type thing when it comes to school funding.
Q: What else would you like the community to know about you?
A: The important thing to share with the community is I just look forward to serving in my role, being here. It’s an honor and an opportunity to have been selected by the school board, and all the support from staff and from parents, from community members — all directed toward what's best for students. I look forward to working for the best things for our youth here in our community for the upcoming school years. I think the best days of our school district are ahead of us, and this is going to be one of the best school years that we all will see.
Q: What gives you that confidence?
A: I think there's just a certain energy. We have some positions that we need to fill, but we're sitting really well. We have some veteran educators that are just so excited about starting the year, contributing, offering ideas on how we can do things just bigger and better. Just excited about this coming school year.
We had our district in-service, and it was one of our largest district in-services that we've had. We were able to get everybody together at once, including our custodial staff, our office staff across the district, and our paraeducators. We provided training opportunities where they attended various trainings to support them.
Q: What would you like to say to students going into this school year?
A: I look forward to seeing them. I've grown to know a lot of students and families in our community over the years. I look forward to seeing them when I'm out in the buildings, especially up at the high school for my middle schoolers I just sent up.
We're here for you and look forward to supporting you, and just hope you have a great year.
• Contact Jasz Garrett at jasz@juneauindependent.com or (907) 723-9356.
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