Sep. 28—Anchorage School District officials say they are coupling this year’s effort to close more elementary schools with a plan to add child care operations to vacant classrooms.
A proposal for where those child care centers will be located is set to be released alongside the district’s recommended school closures at an Oct. 7 Anchorage School Board meeting. The plan is subject to school board approval and would expand access to child care for Anchorage School District employees, city workers and the community at large.
“It’s not just about closing schools. It’s about being smart about how we use extra space in our elementary school buildings,” Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said of the plan at a Sept. 17 event at King Tech High School.
During a Sept. 16 presentation to the school board, ASD Chief Operating Officer Jim Anderson said the co-located child care centers could be at elementary or secondary school buildings.
“This is the heart and soul of ‘rightsizing’ this year, is looking at it in terms of potential for helping out the community and not just closing every school that is low capacity,” Anderson said.
Child care providers and advocates have called the lack of affordable child care in Alaska a crisis. Statewide child care nonprofit thread Alaska reports that both tuition and operating costs for providers have continued to rise, and only about 180 child care businesses remain in Anchorage. In 2015, Anchorage had over 300.
More than half of respondents to a 2023 thread survey of parents said they can’t work as much as they’d like to because of child care constraints. Anchorage’s current child care capacity is 41% short of the need, according to thread, meaning more than 8,000 children are left without access to child care.
“Families, communities and businesses struggle when parents lack access to reliable, affordable child care,” thread CEO Stephanie Berglund said.
Berglund pointed to a June report from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national community development organization, which said co-location of child care operations within other community spaces “creates a unique opportunity for a level of resources that may be prohibitive to a standalone child care facility.”
At the same time, the Anchorage School District has closed five schools since 2017 as it has lost over 6,000 students since 2010. District finance officials blame the closures on declining spending power due to inflation and years of stagnant state funding for schools, along with a steady exodus of public neighborhood school students to charter and homeschool programs. Current school board members are starting their third round of “rightsizing” the district by voting to close schools, which district leaders say will more efficiently serve a declining student population.
When board members voted to close Lake Hood and Nunaka Valley elementary schools last year, they also directed Bryantt to recommend closing at least one more school this fall. The board will vote on the administration’s closure recommendations at the Nov. 18 meeting.
The process for determining which schools to close has changed significantly in recent years, Anderson said, and the November vote on school closures is meant to give board members ample time to discuss budget issues in December. Officials say the district faces an approximately $75 million budget deficit for next school year.
Under the plan to allow child care providers to operate in Anchorage School District buildings, the district would lease available space to licensed child care providers, according to Anderson.
Details on the proposed child care centers won’t be released until next month, but Anderson said that about 20% of capacity will be set aside for children of ASD employees. Anderson said providing child care for teachers with young children could help the district retain teachers more effectively.
“The number of people in the district that likely would be looking at this and/or commercial child care in our schools is really high,” Anderson said. “There’s certainly a noticeable lack as the Assembly, the mayor, even at the state level, everyone recognizes there’s not enough child care.”
The school district is one of 20 grant recipients of money from Anchorage marijuana taxes to use for child care. The Anchorage Assembly in June approved a plan from the Anchorage Child Care and Early Education Fund that will support adding child care operations to schools. Members approved a $224,217 grant to ASD to “repurpose underutilized classrooms into licensing-ready, rent-free spaces for community-based childcare or early education providers.”
While the district is seeking to co-locate more child care operations within school buildings, some already serve Anchorage families with child care options.
In South Anchorage, the Bear Valley Community Association created a nonprofit in 2003 to stand up a child care operation at Bear Valley Elementary School. The School Aged Child Care program serves kids before and after school, and a preschool program launched last year. The program now serves about 80 children in the after-school program with another 10 who remain on a waiting list.
Meagan DeBenedetto, chief operating officer for School Aged Child Care, said there’s a need for expanded child care access all across the city.
“We’re all pretty aware about the extreme lack of child care,” DeBenedetto said. “We kind of just made a little hub here in the community.”
Solomon Crownover came to pick up his son Koa from the multi-purpose room at Bear Valley after school on a recent weekday.
“All the parents here, they drop their kids off, and if they pick their kid up early, it’s a fight,” Crownover said. “They’re like, ‘No, I want to stay’ because they just have such a good time here.”
Fourth grader Brock Heagy spent most of his time after school at the School Aged Child Care program playing outside, moving playground gravel to create a home for his stuffed turtle.
“They have lots of activities. Sometimes I don’t really know what to do, because there’s so much,” Heagy said. “It’s really convenient for my mom and dad, and they just like drop us off here, give us a lunch box, backpack, and we’re good. It’s really, really, really easy.”
A similar program exists at Rabbit Creek Elementary, and Campfire Alaska operates programming at 17 Anchorage School District schools.
Anderson said the process for adding child care facilities to schools is likely to take several years.
Charter schools could also benefit from the newly available space if the board votes to close additional schools in November. Anderson said district administration would prioritize allowing charter schools currently paying leases elsewhere to move into closed school buildings. Each elementary school that closed at the end of last year now houses a charter school; Alaska Native Cultural Charter School is in the old Lake Hood building, and STrEaM Academy is in the old Nunaka building.
Anchorage isn’t the only district where Alaska schools have closed recently as a symptom of declining student populations and years of flat state funding for schools. Early this year, the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board voted to close three schools and the Kodiak Island Borough School District closed an elementary school.
[Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that STrEaM Academy, not Rilke Schule German Immersion School, is now located in the former Nunaka Valley Elementary building.]