A dozen Alaska schools closed their doors in May, the most closures in a single year in the last two decades, according to the state education department.

Clusters of school closures in urban areas of the state had been uncommon until recently, but are part of a larger trend as public school enrollment declines nationwide. School district officials have framed closures as a means to bridge multimillion-dollar deficits, but some research suggests districts don’t realize meaningful savings. Closures can also have negative impacts on students and families.

According to data from the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development, 60 schools closed between 1999 and fall 2025. Another 12 schools closed this year, part of the 28 total that have closed in the last three years alone.

Four districts closed schools this year, and each of the state’s largest five districts have closed schools in the last three years. In interviews, school district superintendents said closures are caused by insufficient and unpredictable state funding, demographic changes and, to varying degrees, the proliferation of school choice.

Superintendents, lawmakers and Alaska Education Commissioner Deena Bishop agreed that closures are likely to continue unless something changes.

State legislators last year passed the first permanent increase to state formula funding for schools since 2017, but school officials said state funding remains inadequate. This year, lawmakers approved one-time energy relief payments for districts totaling at least $29 million — with up to $115 million in additional funding contingent on unexpected oil revenue — and an education package that directs spending for specific programs as opposed to the per-student formula.

Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District Superintendent Randy Trani said Alaska districts no longer have enough funding to provide all the choices families want while maintaining the expected access to neighborhood public schools.

“There is a general funding problem for K-12 education where we just have not kept up with inflation, and simultaneously districts are being asked to provide more choices, and choices cost money,” Trani said. “We’re all dealing with this more and more choice thing, and we’re all dealing with less and less funding.”

Alaska school districts offer 34 correspondence programs. In the last 25 years, 10,000 Alaska students have moved from neighborhood public schools to correspondence programs, typically taking their per-student funding with them.

Bishop, the state education commissioner, said that’s evidence that families want additional choices beyond neighborhood public schools.

“There will be continued school closures, and I believe there will be continued choice programs to pull people back or to give people what they want,” Bishop said.

Contributing to the enrollment decline, Alaska has had more than a decade of sustained outmigration as the birth rate continues to decline nationwide.

School finance officials have identified class size increases and school closures as the most direct ways to cut expenses for districts facing budget shortfalls, but families have pushed back against large class sizes that can be harmful for student learning.

Closures combine schools under one building to provide more opportunities for students. State law allows a three-year grace period where districts still receive some funding for the closed school under the “hold harmless” provision, incentivizing closures for some districts.

Neighborhood schools, and choice

The Mat-Su school board voted to close Glacier View School after enrollment dipped near the 10-student limit. Trani said several dozen other school-aged children live in the area who don’t attend Glacier View. He said the factors driving closures in the Mat-Su are the same ones that districts in Anchorage and on the Kenai Peninsula are facing.

“Funding, birth rate, and then movement, offering more choices, which we can’t afford to do anymore,” Trani said. “If those three trends don’t change, or if some combination of them doesn’t change, then school closures are going to be on the docket every year going forward.”

Students who attended Glacier View School can choose from a variety of homeschool or correspondence programs next year, or drive more than 50 miles to and from Sutton or Palmer for class each day.

Trani said his district didn’t have many other options to reduce the budget after they cut one-eighth of staff members last year. In a survey asking residents to rank district budget priorities, community members indicated they would not support a four-day school week or cuts to sports programs, but would want to preserve class sizes, Trani said.

Along with Glacier View, Larson and Meadow Lakes elementary schools also closed in the district.

In Anchorage, families have also pushed back against proposed cuts to sports, teachers and school nurses. The Anchorage School Board responded with a fast-tracked plan to close three schools, which spawned a lawsuit from Campbell STEM Elementary School parents.

After the April municipal election, several Anchorage voters said they didn’t approve the district’s school bond and special education tax levy because of their distrust in the district stemming from the closure decisions.

According to the most recent data available from Alaska’s education department, about 12% of neighborhood public school students statewide switched to correspondence schools in the 2020-21 school year, a time marked by upheaval from the COVID-19 pandemic. Of those nearly 9,600 students who left brick-and-mortar school buildings, only about 5,800 had returned in 2021-22.

While a smaller percentage of neighborhood public school students in the 2021-22 school year switched to correspondence schools — 3% — the number of students who returned the following year, 850, continued to lag far behind the number of students who had left, nearly 2,100.

The Anchorage School District is the state’s largest and has lost about 7,500 students since 2015, closing six schools in the last four years. The district saw an 84% increase in correspondence students between 2011 and 2025.

Despite that enrollment drop, Anchorage School Board President Carl Jacobs said the recent cluster of closures are a symptom of state fiscal issues plaguing several core government services.

“It’s a process that, with the right leadership at the state level, may have been completely avoidable,” Jacobs said. “The issue is so much bigger than just school choice.”

ASD Superintendent Jharrett Bryantt said the district will not close more schools next year, and instead will work to rebuild trust with the community. He said closures should be used as a way to improve academic offerings for students, not to close budget deficits as they were this year.

Bryantt said results from Anchorage residents on a budget-balancing simulation showed the community supports school closures. Bryantt said choice schools are not causing school closures, and called for an increase to state funding.

“Thousands of families in Anchorage and all over the state are choosing their neighborhood schools, and they are urging us to figure out ways to strengthen those neighborhood schools,” Bryantt said. “There is certainly a conversation to be had about consolidations, but I think it’s a red herring to pit neighborhood against choice.”

Benefits for students

While many districts sought out low-capacity schools to close, district leaders on the Kenai Peninsula felt they couldn’t combine students at its smallest schools in more remote communities — such as Cooper Landing, Hope, Moose Pass or Razdolna — with others without disproportionately increasing travel time for those students.

The KPBSD Board of Education has voted to close five schools in the last two years, but reversed planned class size increases with additional funding from the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Superintendent Clayton Holland expects more school closures next year, but said he’s dreading those discussions. Districts budgets are due to local municipalities or boroughs before the Legislature has determined what level of funding to appropriate for schools.

“We’re so intent on a short-term financial stability or financial gain that, because we don’t know what we have, that we have to go through this early. It’s not as planned out as it could be,” Holland said.

Closed in 2025, the Nikolaevsk School has been approved to reopen as a charter school by the district and state Board of Education and Early Development. Housing charter schools has become a popular use for the vacated buildings.

Farther north, the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District has shuttered seven schools in the last four years, more than any other district in the state.

Unlike Anchorage, Fairbanks Superintendent Luke Meinert said his district had a much smaller savings account to draw from as state funding fell flat year after year, and hasn’t received the maximum allowable local contribution from the borough.

That led district officials to invest early in the idea of closing schools, and giving residents an idea of what to expect long term. Meinert said the emotional toll that closures have on the community is real.

“We were kind of on the tip of the spear in terms of having to make some of these painful decisions earlier than some other school districts,” Meinert said. “We went through three rounds of school closures, and I will say, while we felt like the process from administration got better each time we did it, it’s still incredibly difficult and painful.”

Bobby Burgess, the Fairbanks school board president, said military families were concerned about the plan to close Ben Eielson Jr./Sr. High School. But the small class sizes limited what educators could offer, and students had more options once they moved to North Pole High School.

“Because those kids were not getting that number of electives, there were a lot of folks who were, in the end, OK with the move because they had more choice and more opportunity,” Burgess said.

Burgess said the closures were approved as a way to avoid class size increases. Instead of more school closures this year, Fairbanks officials used the savings from prior closures to reintroduce elementary music offerings and programs for gifted students during their budget process.

Outmigration

In Southeast Alaska, former Juneau School District Superintendent Frank Hauser said consolidations and closures have had a positive impact on student performance.

“By combining the schools in Juneau, we’ve been able to maintain and expand opportunities for students,” Hauser said. “The board here has also not had to make the heartbreaking decisions other school boards in the state have made to cut art or music or other opportunities or supports for students.”

The Juneau School Board voted to close three schools in 2024 and reopen one as a middle school the following year. Hauser’s time as superintendent ended last month, but he said the consolidations saved the district money.

Juneau and other Southeast communities have experienced more rapid population decline than other parts of the state, and suffer less from school choice options.

“While we’ve seen a lot of improvements and positive impact from the consolidation and the closure, the district is still projecting a multimillion-dollar deficit for FY28,” Hauser said.

Ketchikan Gateway Borough School Board President Katherine Tatsuda said their district represents the other side of that equation. Board members in Ketchikan voted to close two elementary schools and increase class sizes after cutting about about one-quarter of their staff to reduce expenses.

“None of us knew how significant of a really negative financial position we were in until we got into it at the end of February,” Tatsuda said.

Research from Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis released in May suggests closures don’t save districts as much as expected, and districts often come closer to breaking even after closing schools.

“With closures comes a whole host of other kinds of expenses that can show up,” Stanford assistant professor of education Francis Pearman has said. “It’s not free to close up a building and to move students and material elsewhere.”

Further research indicates that poorly handled school closures can exacerbate racial inequities and hamper student achievement.

Last year, the school board in Ketchikan avoided closures by restructuring elementary schools, which Tatsuda said drove many families to leave the district for choice schools.

“Basically, every single department across the board and every school was impacted by that reduction in force, and so the impact to students is (that) there will be larger class sizes for sure,” Tatsuda said.

Tatsuda said residents have been emotional and frustrated with the decision, and called on lawmakers to forward-fund education.

State Sen. Löki Tobin, an Anchorage Democrat who co-chairs the legislative Task Force on Education Funding, said Alaska’s shift to the per-pupil model that ties school funding to the location of students is part of the problem.

“We don’t have good statewide policies to support families,” Tobin said. “What we also should be thinking about is new school finance models, and I think that’s really where the work of the task force and education funding is critical.”

Tobin suggested paid family leave, a statewide option to access healthcare, improvements to the foster care system and raising wages. She said Alaskans uncertain if their school might close next should support state leaders who support schools.

“The hope is November,” Tobin said. “There have been multiple opportunities for us to stop this rash of school closures, and that has been at the ballot box.”

The recent strike and killing of a pregnant fin whale by a cruise ship in the Gulf of Alaska tragically highlights decades of inaction by the federal government and shipping industry to enact reasonable measures to reduce this risk. Such whale protection measures include vessel speed reductions, or VSRs, to 10 knots or less and bow watches posted in designated whale habitat. A voluntary vessel speed reduction off California has reportedly reduced ship-whale strikes by half, while also reducing underwater noise, fuel use and harmful stack emissions.

While technological options to detect and avoid whales, such as thermal imaging infrared cameras, forward-looking sonar, sonic pingers and passive acoustic monitoring, are useful, the best way to reduce the risk of ship-whale strikes is slower speed and a posted bow watch.

Similar to speed limits for cars in school zones when children are present, ship speed reductions give both a ship crew and whales more time to detect each other and avoid a collision. They also reduce the risk of more serious or fatal injuries if a collision occurs.

We know that the number of whales actually observed killed by ships is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of total mortalities. To be detected, usually a struck whale must remain pinned across the bow of a ship and carried into port. Studies have estimated that whale mortalities unobserved offshore compared with those observed are anywhere from 7-to-1 to 25-to-1. Given the thousands of whales and ships overlapping in Alaska waters each year, it is more than likely that hundreds of whales have been struck and killed here.

It is important for the public to know the record of failure by government and industry to reduce this risk.

Beginning in 2009, I proposed to the incoming Obama administration that it enact greater protections for Unimak Pass in the eastern Aleutians and Bering Strait, including ship-whale strike reduction measures. I reiterated this specific ship-whale strike reduction request in 2013, 2018, 2021 and 2022. Each time, the federal administration declined to act.

Additionally, in 2022, I proposed directly to the Prince William Sound tanker owners that they enact voluntary speed reductions to reduce the risk of whale strikes. These huge oil tankers steam year-round directly across the paths of hundreds of whales. In June 2009, the Exxon tanker Kodiak entered Valdez with a dead humpback whale stuck on its bow.

I then proposed to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the PWS Regional Citizens Advisory Council that they press the tanker owners to adopt voluntary whale protection measures.

NOAA convened an informative technical workshop on the issue but declined to take any action, presenting a flawed assessment of the risk. In response to a formal scientific integrity complaint I filed with the agency, the NOAA National Appeals Office directed its Alaska staff to provide a supplemental assessment of the ship-whale strike risk in PWS that corrected some, but not all, of its previous flawed assessment. The agency continued to decline to take any action.

In July 2024, the PWSRCAC sent a letter to tanker owners asking them to consider adopting a speed reduction in PWS, which the tanker owners declined the following month, saying they would only “follow the guidance, direction, and regulations provided by NOAA/NMFS on this matter.”

In March 2023, two organizations I am associated with, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and The Ocean Foundation, submitted a proposed rulemaking to NOAA asking the agency to adopt a nationwide protocol to reduce whale strikes by ships

The petition proposes that the agency designate critical whale safety zones in all U.S. waters in which ships would be required to slow to 10 knots during the day, 8 knots in low visibility, such as nighttime, fog or heavy weather, and post bow watches to detect whales ahead. Neither the Biden nor the Trump administration responded to the petition, the latter saying earlier this year only that “NMFS is still considering the 2023 petition.”

After two suspected ship strikes on whales in Icy Strait in August 2024, I urged the Cruise Lines International Association with its 59 member companies, to adopt voluntary speed reductions and other whale-strike reduction measures in critical Alaska whale habitats. The cruise ship association ignored the request.

Again in February of this year, I urged the Cruise Lines International Association and NOAA to enter into a memorandum of agreement specifically to reduce the risk of whale strikes this summer in Alaska. In a Feb. 20 email, the cruise association responded: “In addition to specialized training for crew, cruise lines have agreed to the voluntary slowdown of vessels in sensitive areas or when marine life is observed/present. Cruise lines also use methods and technologies such as bow-positioned observers and online monitoring and reporting apps to carefully navigate in ways that are respectful and protective of marine mammals.”

When I pressed them for details on these vague, questionable assertions and reiterated our proposed memorandum of agreement between the Cruise Lines International Association and NOAA, the cruise association went silent. Later that month, NOAA’s Alaska regional director responded to the proposal: “Here in Alaska, we continue to engage with the cruise industry to reduce the risk of vessel strikes (e.g., encouraging the use of Whale Alert). Due to reduced capacity we’re quite limited in our ability to do more proactive work with the cruise industry at this time.”

After the fin whale was struck and killed by the Ovation of the Seas in the Gulf of Alaska last month, I again pressed NOAA and the Cruise Lines International Association to enter into a memorandum of agreement to reduce such risk, suggesting that important whale safety zones in Alaska waters that need strategic vessel speed reductions include at least Icy Strait, Prince William Sound, Resurrection Bay/Kenai Fjords, Unimak Pass and Bering Strait.

The cruise association has yet to respond, and NOAA’s regional director said simply that they are reviewing the situation and potential next steps.

Tragically, there is still no commitment by the shipping industry or government to address this issue in Alaska. While these same ship owners participate in voluntary whale-strike reduction measures elsewhere, they refuse to do so here in Alaska.

As these ship owners remain unwilling to remedy this voluntarily in Alaska, it is time that NOAA adopt our 2023 proposed rulemaking requiring them to reduce this risk to whales here in Alaska and across the nation.

Alaska whales, who share their ocean home with us terrestrial primates on ships, deserve nothing less.

Rick Steiner is a marine conservation biologist in Anchorage, former marine professor at the University of Alaska and board chair of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

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