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this joint meeting of the legislative task force and education funding to order.
It is 3.33 p.m. here on Friday, January 23rd.
We are blessed to be back in June at our state Capitol building,
and we are meeting in the Betty Davis committee room.
For folks who are interested to follow along today,
this meeting is being streamed live on AKLTV.
I just want to remind folks here in
the room if they please could mute their cell phones.
Members present today is co-chair representative hymns chute representative story representative roughridge
I'm also joined by senator keel senator kronk and myself senator lucy giltoben
additional co chair
I also want to acknowledge that we are joined by several other lawmakers here in the room.
We are join by Representative Aishide, Representative Dibert.
We also are also joined with President Stevens and also by Senator Yunt.
I think I have gotten everyone.
If I miss you, please let me know.
I want think our Juno-LIO moderator today, David Amrenzo, for ensuring that have quality
sound and have the presentation up and available for you.
Today, we will begin with opening remarks by former
Dean Commissioner Michael Hanley, and then we
will proceed on to presentations on chronic absenteeism
from a tenant works executive director Heidi Chang.
We also will receive a presentation
on serving our houseless and homeless students
from Schoolhouse Connection, executive
director Barbara Dunfield, who is joining us on team.
We have also with us the Kenai Peninsula School
McKinney-Vento program, Kelly Keene. We also have the ASD Ingrid School District
Coordinator for the Child and Transition Program, David Mayo-Keely, and also we
will have a presentation today from the Reason Foundation from their senior
policy analyst. And I apologize as I cannot pronounce this individual's last
name so I will wait till they are on the record so that they can help ensure that
Again, for the public, we are not taking public testimony today,
but please continue to email your comments
to edfundtaskforce at akaleg.gov.
We have received numerous comments from the Public,
which has actually helped us shape several
of our task force meetings,
and we're deeply appreciative of the Publix input
and insight as we continue on our journey
about learning more of
our K through 12 education system here in Alaska.
For folks who would like to receive the materials
that have been distributed to members,
they are available by the door there in printed form
and also posted to BASIS,
and that is available on akaleg.gov.
All right, moving on to today's agenda.
I'm very excited that we are joined
by Aleutian Region School District Superintendent
and former Department of Education
and Early Development Commissioner Michael Hanley.
Mr. Hanly served the state of Alaska
in our Alaska Department
of Educational Development from 2011 to 2016.
He was a teacher at the Anchorage School district
from 1991 to 2005 and then a principal from 2005 to 2011.
in business, excuse me, he holds degrees
in Business Administration and K-8 Education
and a Master's Degree in Educational Leadership
from my alma mater, the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Mr. Hanley, thank you for joining us today.
If you could please identify yourself with a record
and begin your remarks when you are ready.
Thank you, co-chair Katoban, I'm Mike Hanle for the record.
And I think you gave the introduction that I...
That I was going to give which is great. So it's been about 35 years that I've been in the Alaska educational system
And so I come to this meeting with a lens of both having worked at the the state level some of the largest
Institutions in our state both state-level and the Anchorage school district our largest school districts and now at
the Alucia region school District
Which is if not these smallest one of our one or our two smallest school
districts in this state
I greatly appreciate the work that this task force is doing, because as you mentioned co-chair Tobin
To learn more about the education system, and it is so much more than than data points
It is, so, much the, work, that, we do it's worthy work and its hard work
and the reason i've been here for for 35 years and
It's more, than those points we see on the spread sheet
And so I appreciate the fact that you are looking beyond those points.
You're using those point, they're valid points, usually, but you're looking
beyond the sound bites and you look into what is it that we're trying to do in our educational system.
I rarely look for inspirational quotes in state statute,
but one of the very first statutes that
we find at the beginning of education section is 1403 016.
And it says this, it's the policy of this state that the purpose of education is to
help ensure that all students will succeed in their education and work, shape worthwhile
and satisfying lives for themselves, exemplifying the best values of society and be effective
Those don't fit well into data points.
There are a few easily quantifiable things
that we use when we can,
but it's also so much more.
It's the shaping of lives to be valuable,
contributing members to our community.
And I spent 20 years of my career
in the elementary setting.
We were all about that, you know,
raising up our kids and learn how to play well with others,
how be good citizens, how look out for each other,
how make mistakes and recover from those mistakes.
So there's a whole lot to that.
So, for five years, I wrestled with you, alongside you as the Commissioner of Education, to try to address those hurdles that we face, try
to improve the outcomes that you desperately want for our kids.
One lesson that I learned while I was here, that it is really easy to make a decision from a distance, and it's really challenging to
And I say that because I could sit in my office and I can pull up all the data sheets and
I pull all this spreadsheets and rank our schools based on their test scores, based
on attendance, and say these schools are doing well and these are not doing it well.
that the commissioner doesn't always have the tools to address.
It has very few of the tool to
address the things we're trying to get for our kids.
If there is a silver bullet in education,
it's not the Commissioner's seat.
Respectfully, it is probably not your seat,
it there's a high quality.
teacher who cares about kids in every classroom, they can help shape their lives,
help show them the values of society, help them go beyond and be prepared for what comes next.
When the test scores no longer matter, when they're 27 or 35 and they are contributing members
of the society that's where that silver bullet is, it's that high quality adult individual
That I couldn't if I didn't fully understand I felt like I understood the data
I understand the numbers on the page, but I don't understand. The drivers of that data
So I spent a lot of my five years in the field in our schools
In our communities with our kids to try to understand and it allowed me to better grasp what the date am meant
It was no longer a number, but it was an identifier.
I said, oh, I see what's going on in this community.
And it changed the way I thought, and it helped
me to make better decisions.
So I appreciate what this committee is doing to better understand,
to take those field trips, if you will.
And my encouragement would be to not only this task force,
but to the whole legislature to spend time and get to really know
schools because a data point doesn't reflect the work of a teacher, the struggles of
a child and the works that's going on. So to really get to know your schools, it's impossible
to all the schools in this state, but get the know yours. When the data points come out,
so when the sound bites come, you can say, that doesn t really ring true for what I know,
what i've observed in my school. You have that knowledge that s not from a distance,
the context of the data matters, the
context our schools matter and the
variability of that context across our
state is huge. From the Anchorage School
District where I started to the
Aleutian Region School District which is
way out on the end of The Chain by the
way, Dutch Harbor is kind of middle and
I've got everything west of
that. So about as remote, probably the
most remote district in the country,
very rich in culture and geography and
but the variability in the context of that is quite different.
The other context I came to understand
as a particular challenge is statewide is that unfortunately
Alaska is in top three behind Nevada
and Kentucky leading the country in domestic violence and abuse.
According to the latest Kids Count data,
our kids ranked 40th in a country as far as child welfare goes.
That's a part of the context that we face, not just in any particular community but across
our state.
That is part the contexts we have to understand what our kids walk in with, the trauma that
our kid oftentimes face is what we are called to address.
I will give you just a couple of brief examples, a brief example from Anchorage School District.
schools across the spectrum and there is one the Mountain View community is a
community wrought with poverty and in an inordinate amount of violence and trauma
in that and it's there's a there're a couple schools that sit right there
And at the other end of town and the
other of the spectrum is Bear Valley.
It sits up on the hillside.
Their parents are upper income.
They're the lawyers and doctors.
And so you can imagine, if you were to guess
what the data looks like for both of those
schools, you would be correct.
In regards to test scores,
or in regards truancy.
Poverty impacts education.
It's not the amount of dollars,
but what poverty
causes, it causes stress in families,
it cause insecurity with food,
it caused safety concerns,
it causing homelessness.
So those kids walk in with that.
And so to look at a data point,
Mountain View is not a failing school.
If we were to switch those kid's magically,
somehow switch the schools,
the data would follow those children
because those experiences that they have grown up with
are very, very different.
I share that just to share there's that context, that important context to the day that we have.
And I know today's part of today is looking at how do we deal with chronic absenteeism.
How do you deal that child in a Mountain View neighborhood school that's not coming to school
when we know that the drivers are that they're not safe?
They've got ACEs, you know, childhood trauma.
They're not sure where their next meal's coming from.
How do we address that well?
At the other end of that spectrum, I would say that if you were to look up my schools,
and my kids generally love to come to school, but you would look at a piece of data
on chronic absenteeism and you'd find that 25% of my
kids in Atka are chronically absent.
And it would be appropriate for you to ask the question,
so pretty significant statistic, you know,
what's going on there?
And I'd say, well, first of all, 25% is three children.
There are only 12 kids in the school, not as a disclaimer,
but those three kids are high school kids.
ACT is the last place where a nung-un to new
is still spoken fluently.
These three individuals,
are taking language classes, they're part of culture camps. They are traveling around the state
working with other villages and tribes. Their mom is the tribal leader.
They're dancers and they are the next culture bearers for that community.
So if you were to ask me, well don't you want them in school more? I would say
I don t know. When they re there, we re having to work double hard to make sure that they
It would be a lot easier if they were in school, but am I willing to say you need math more than you
need the culture of your community? That's a tough call. So again, it's the context of that
that data that we have. I want to encourage the task force. Context of data is not
a heavy weight, it's just an observation.
It's a cautionary tale to look beyond a number.
So I'm so thankful that this
task force, just that looking kind of behind the proverbial curtain
of education, to see what it is, what are these drivers behind these numbers?
And I hope you get a chance, as individuals, and maybe as a task force, to not just see
the shiny parts, which are great and encouraging, but to see the challenging parts as well.
To see those challenges where we're trying to do the best we can to come alongside kids,
and help meet their Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that they can then learn.
that educators across the spectrum are the most altruistic outward focused other focused
people I know and that's why they're in the field. There are there are bad players I
know that but in general they are focused on others.
There aren't no bad
players in this and I
know sometimes it feels like we sit on opposite sides and i'll say we now sitting as a district
We're on opposite sides, but we're not, we are on the same team.
My bragging points, from a school district perspective, are your bragging
points as a legislature?
Successful kids, empowering teachers, powerful teachers.
Kids are successful beyond high school, making worthwhile lives for themselves.
Those are what we all want.
Task with different roles and different responsibilities to get us there.
But we sit on same side, it always pains me a bit to see.
us painting each other sometimes, as someone that's not on the same team.
The work we do, it's hard work. It's worthy work,
it is probably the most gratifying and challenging work I've ever done,
and it mainly the only work that I have ever
to you. And I hope that this doesn't feel heavy. I want it to be encouraging to
say, let's look farther like you already are doing. But my caution is that there
may not be a simple solution. There may
not a be simple statute that adequately addressed the complex community,
educational, cultural, human challenges that we face.
It may not be a simple answer at the end of the day, but the fact that you're looking
in, it takes us steps forward, better understanding it across the board is where we need to be
so that we can come alongside of each other and dress in the needs of our kids.
Thank you.
Thank You.
ThankYou.
Thankyou.
Superintendent Hanley.
Are there any questions from committee members?
Well, I do have one because you and I talked about it in our office and
I think you have an interesting insight into a question that I know the task
force is planning to address and one that we have been grappling with, which is
around consolidation. We've heard from many stakeholders that there is a need
to consolidate school districts. There is cost savings and consolidating school
districts and your response to me was very insightful so I hope you'll share
it with my colleagues today.
I would be glad to do that, and it is actually one of the hesitancies I've had about coming
down to testifying too much, afraid that the consolidation conversation would derail whatever
we were trying to cover.
It's perfectly appropriate and I'm not worried about sharing it with you.
We fund by the ADM, we fund the student, in a general consolidation, there won't be a
and I'll give you my personal example.
I'm out at the end of the Aleutian chain.
We have 1.5 FTEs that run our district.
I am going to 0.45.
I've got two other 0,5s
that ran our districts.
So we can't get a whole lot leaner than that,
but if I want to consolidate,
if we want it to consolidate and say,
you know what, why don't you just join in next door
with Analaska?
AnALaska is a city school district, we're in REAA.
Statutorily, we can't. They're funded slightly different. There's local contributions and things that are different for REA's than there are for cities.
So I would have to jump over on Alaska and go to Aleutians East Borough School District.
Same thing.
They are a borough. We're an REAA. I couldn't feasibly join with them. It's not because I don't want to.
the lower coast to Bristol Bay, Lake and Penn, 700 miles away, and join with one of those.
The impact of that financially for the state may be zero, maybe very minimal. We may
be able to move from 1.5 FTEs that run our district to maybe just one, that they would
My job when I say these things, that's not where this is coming from.
But because I had the conversation as commissioner as well,
the one thing that is lost though, is now I've got a school district
that doesn't really have as good representation as they used to.
There's a schools district out here with five board seats that represent
their communities that know their community that lead the school districts
based on their needs. Those board suits get lost.
and they get combined with another school district.
So the representation from the community is less,
and there's a big cost to that, not a financial cost,
but a bit cost in the voice in communities.
So I think if you just did the math,
that's what it would take.
It would say take somebody to say do the maths,
let's put these kids together,
let us put it into statute and say,
what does it look like now if we fund it?
You'll find it to be a negligible number.
I did it when I was commissioner,
I haven't done it recently.
And the cost to districts can be it cost of my district would be relatively high
Meaning a loss of voice in those communities
Thank you. Thank You superintendent
I want to thank you for joining us today
We really appreciate your service to the state and your advocacy for your students
And I've really appreciated your comments this afternoon. But you I
Do you want a note for the record that we were joined by senator Bjorkman at 3 40 p.m?
We will now move on to our next agenda item, which is a presentation from Attendance Works,
which a nationally recognized organization that works on the topic of attendance and chronic
absenteeism.
We are joined by their executive director, Hadi Chang.
This nonprofit organization partners with schools and school districts to address the
issue of students who chronically miss school days.
Executive Director Chang and Senate Education about two years ago to talk about this very same topic.
So I'm very excited to have her back with us today.
Welcome to the Task Force Director, Chang.
If you could please identify yourself for the record and begin your presentation when you are ready.
Greetings.
Thank you so much for inviting me, co-chair Tobin and the members of the task force.
So I'm Hadi Chang.
I am the executive director of attendance works.
I call in from San Francisco, California.
Thank so for having me.
I will say that I really appreciated the comments of Superintendent Hani just before.
I did have the pleasure of coming to Juneau, I think about a year.
Two years ago also, when meeting with all your local superintendents, and it gave me such a deep appreciation for the context of Alaska, which I can't speak to know well, but I recognize and appreciate that anything I say is going to have to get translated to what works and what makes
slide. I don't know how many people who were here two years ago or how
many are new but I just want to be clear that the work that we've done has been
to really help people think about this metric of chronic absence which is
missing 10% or more over the course of the school year. The point of this
metric is for us to notice kids who are missing out
on the opportunity to benefit from whatever is being taught in the classroom and schools.
The idea around it is to really make sure that you're taking a prevention,
trauma-informed approach when kids have faced kind of the traumas that can happen in communities
and sometimes even in homes. They're more likely to be chronically absent. And when that happens,
What happened and how can I help and this requires a real attention to family engagement?
This is different from truancy, which is so trying to get this is only about a
Decade old it really wasn't even a measure that people understood or used
We used to look only at unexcused absences and the assumption there was often if you missed school it must be because your
Students or families don't care
or we only look at average daily attendance,
which in some places has been used for funding schools.
But if you go the next slide,
what we know is that when kids miss too much school
for any reason, it leads them to be less likely
to being reading at the end of third grade,
less like to to achieving in middle school,
more likely to suspended,
more like likely not to not graduate.
And it actually affects.
and is connected to the development of their social,
emotional, and executive functioning skills.
Later on, when you get a job, you actually
have to have the habit and the skill of showing up
every day, even when it's not so hard.
So this is about really equipping students
to be the kind of productive, engaged citizens
that we want in our communities today.
And the other thing that I've seen,
is that when you have high levels of chronic absence, the impact actually can ripple.
When you do have lots of kids chronically absent in a single classroom, it makes it harder because
teachers need to sometimes re-teach concepts. It's harder to establish classroom norms,
kids finishing their projects, and sometimes when there's a lot of
making it harder to establish that culture of an engagement
attendance that is so crucial. If kids are in a classroom with high levels of
multiple kids chronically absent in the beginning of the school year,
they themselves can become more likely to be chronically
absent at the end of school years. And if you go to the next slide, you can see
that nationally, chronic absence nearly doubled
everywhere and was over the pandemic and it started to
but it's a really slow decrease and the rate of decrease is actually even getting slower and if you
go to the next slide, this is what you can see for your own Alaska data that you make available
on your website. You had a fairly high level before, but you went from 28 to almost 50%.
post during the pandemic and you're still at about 43% statewide in terms of chronic
extremely high levels of chronic absence that you all are experiencing. And if you go to the next
slide, I just want to, and I don't unfortunately have this data for Alaska, but it is something
that could probably ask your State Department of Ed to calculate for you, if look at chronic
by grade levels. And this is data based on a number of states that have made this state available.
And I would just point out a couple of trends here. One is that chronic absence tends to start
pretty high. It's like the Nike swoosh, you know? And then it goes higher. But one of the things
that we're seeing, and I don't know if this was the same pattern for Alaska or not, is
do some reductions in the early grades, still too high, but making progress,
we're amongst our older kids, that progress hasn't been happening. You have still extraordinarily
high. It's been harder to get chronic absence levels down. If you go to the next slide,
is finding out and figuring out why kids miss too much school in the first place.
That's both a question for every school and every district to figure out,
so you can figure if you have driving reasons, but you as a state thinking about it.
And this figuring this out really requires a partnership with your schools,
your communities, your families,
your community partners to be able to answer.
To what extent, and this can vary by community, is this barriers because you don't have access to health care, you have acute or chronic illness.
Is it barriers, because there is housing insecurity that's leading to high levels of homelessness, which I know you're going to talk about more later on.
challenges with high levels anxiety or bullying happening so kids don't want to be school in school
or families have had negative experience themselves in schools so don t want be there.
Is it disengagement because kids and families aren t feeling connected to peers or to teachers
or don?t see how the curriculum is relevant to their lives and to a different kind of future?
So, but whether you recognize it just missing two days a month, that's, you know, 18 days
over the school year is missing 10% of school, it's just really about two
days per month. If folks see that that has an impact on their learning and
development, one of the things that we've seen is that sometimes families now think
that you can make up for it all just by turning in your homework, when some of
in-person learning that you can gain in a classroom is still crucial. We've also seen the post-pandemic.
Many, many folks see that they should stay home for any sign of illness. And so when that's a case,
Kit has a mild stomach ache, has maybe allergies. They think those are signs that stay
what can be hard is that that actually can make the situation worse because a kid is less connected
to adults falling farther behind. So one of the things that we see is so crucial is equipping
schools district and their community partners to find out why kids are missing school and then if
it's a large number of schools of kids figuring out how are you as a community going to help to
what that looks like, what
that looked like in incredibly
rural communities,
what does that look like?
And if you have
tribal communities often,
it's really important to partner with them
to figure out what is it both
that are the barriers,
but what all would make
and ensure that
students are engaged in school.
So they're motivated to show
and I want to
What we found is that the key to improving attendance is really investing in those positive
conditions of learning that make kids want to be there in the first place. Now, while this can
look different, the basic concepts are the same across places. You need to make sure kids feel
physically, emotionally healthy, and safe, that they have a sense of belonging, connection, support.
that they're surrounded by adults
with the well-being and emotional competence.
You know, I was working for a bit, for example,
with a Europe tribe.
This is in Northern California.
And one of the things they saw was that attendance
was really challenged at the time
when you had the salmon harvest going on.
And the one other things that the Europe tribal judge
started to try to do is how do you create a curriculum
where you leverage that activity?
to get kids engaged and the teachers and school thinking about how would you make that part of
the learning and instruction so there isn't having to be a choice between participating in a
traditional activity that was so important to the tribe and being in school. Sometimes we have to
think about, how do we create creative partnerships that both create that sense of belonging and
the well-being of kids and families and that's a question that what I think we can do in schools
is equip districts and schools to be able to think creatively about how they do that and you're
using attendance data to monitor when that is not happening so you can start to
think about, how do we invest in resources that motivate kids to show up and if you
go to the next slide. One of the things we've seen is that when schools and districts are
engaging families, they're more likely to have the understandings that allow them to get kids to
show up to school. If you go the the Next Slide, one of things that there's new research and I
realize this is a different context. It's Chicago, which is quite a difference context in what you
School climate issues matter more than ever.
Post-pandemic, they found that if kids feel
that they're safe and not bullied,
feel connected to peers, feel connective to adults,
trust adults.
Those things matter three or four more times.
Post pandemic about attendance.
And then if you go to the next slide,
you can also see.
Director Chang, we do have a question here from the committee members. Senator Keel.
Yes. Sorry to interrupt the presentation. I don't know how to read this chart. It looks to me like
both high and low sense of safety in and around the school lead to a decrease in attendance,
one greater decrease than the other decrease. Am I? Yeah, let me clarify.
is the responses, this is based on kids,
how much, let's say that first one,
feeling safe around the school.
The blue chart, part of that bar was pre-pandemic.
How much it contributed to improved attendance
or decreased absenteeism pre pandemic?
The yellow was how
much had contributed
to improve the attendance or
decreased absenteeism post pandemics.
Does that help?
So, safety in school, it made negative one a little more than a negative 1% difference
before the pandemic, and post-pandemic it had almost a 5%
difference.
If you took that first measure, okay, thank you.
And so what this is just showing is how these issues of school climate, they mattered
even more. And thank you for that clarifying question.
And then the second chart, if you look and maybe click twice, what it really shows
is that it's showing the absence rates before the pandemic and then
the abstinence rates in the pre-pandemic wage.
And what showed was that when kids went to a high school,
that had those characteristics before.
If you had two kids from the same neighborhood,
but they go to two high schools,
if they went to a high school
that has those characteristic of feeling safe,
relationships between other kids,
relationships with teachers,
that mattered more for that child's attendance
than the neighborhood in which they were.
If we had to kids who came from
the saying neighborhood.
the quality of the school in supporting a positive climate,
made it, and market difference, a measurable difference
beyond even if they came from the same neighborhood.
And this is just saying that sometimes,
and I realize this can be challenging in a very.
spread out communities and you might have to think about virtual opportunities and how you
support that. But in California, they've just recently reduced been conducting an evaluation
of community schools, which makes it easier to have community partners supporting school staff
and doing this work. And they found that that made also an accelerated the decrease in chronic
If you go to the next slide, it's really talking about how taking a multi-tiered supportive approach where you're really investing in these positive conditions for learning universal prevention early intervention matter in Georgia.
investments in school climate, they could make a huge difference and they
could combine their attendance and school
climate efforts to make for an even more efficient use of
resources. And if you go to the next slide,
what we've seen is that when you can make sure that districts
have actionable data so they can help everyone know when kids
are chronically absent so that they do that relationship building and outreach
and engage them in a positive way,
engage user strategic partnerships,
make sure that you're using your data
both on attendance and also on poverty
to figure out which places need even more resources
and see this as shared responsibility.
They could.
and then use their supports to build capacity to do this work, you could really see a measurable
difference and those districts when they have these capacities are better able to make a difference.
And what we've seen is that state departments of education can play a key role in ensuring
districts have those capacities. So the last second last slide is really a couple of things
ensure accurate and comparable data because if you can make sure everyone's, for example, has the same definition of a day attendance, it allows you to compare what's happening in one place to another to both find who's doing a better job, as well as figure out where you need to have deeper
what other kinds of resources you have, and using chronic absence data to figure out who might need
more. You're making sure that when kids move, chronic abstinence data is a data on attendance
is shared so the new district can also support kids if maybe they've been having challenges
with attendance, make sure there's outreach. So there are some places where they'll just
Once kids haven't shown up, they get removed from the roles and that means that kids who are highly
mobile or experience struggles sometimes might not actually be seen and supported by schools.
You can make sure that schools are equipped to have these support systems that begin with
prevention and make that sure you have teams because this really takes a team approach.
And the last is just about the kind of supports
and a technical assistance that you want to have in place
to build the capacity of districts.
And last I just say is that we do have some resources
that help folks think about kinds of interventions
that might be helpful depending upon
what the local situations are.
And then they can think
about which of these interventions
might make most sense for them.
Thank you. Thank You executive director Chang. Do we have questions from task force members?
Representative story, thank you co-chair to Tobin and welcome and thank You for your work miss Chang
I wanted to just ask about page 7 you have 11 states
Listed there and I thought I heard you say that you use these 11 States because they
collect
They have data dashboards or they have some mechanism where you can go in and look at those
states. Is that correct? Yeah, this is about what you publish on your website and whether you make
data by grade level available on the website. So we constructed this by going to the publicly
published data by grade so that you can actually create this picture.
Through the chair. Yeah, thank you for that. Mostly it's a comment wanting to know. I know
our Department of Education is working on a date of dashboard and I just guess I do not know
how much specific data we will be getting and I would it would be great for this
committee to know if our districts will have the ability to do something like
Well, thank you, Representative Storey.
We can definitely ask the department if they are anticipating
or planning to include data dashboards
that include this granular level.
I'm assuming what they might say is there may be some privacy
violations that some of our districts are very small.
And there might be
some dynamics of disaggregated data versus aggregated.
But there is always a question we can ask about how we protect
our students and our student's privacy.
Coach here Tobin, I also want to suggest that you can think about the data in two ways.
One is what's publicly available so anyone can look at it, and then you have to be very concerned about
the privacy issues. Another thing that we've seen states do.
especially when maybe of a lot of districts that might not have the capacity to produce the data on their own is they make data dashboards available, but it's only internally available.
So only educators who have, the confidentiality, you know, and are in are appropriately able to look at the date.
Thank you. Thank You executive director Chang for that information and that insight
We have a question from representative reference
Thank, you chair token
So I'm trying to distill the presentation down into just a couple of thoughts and I
Guess maybe I I am a little concerned about where my head is going. So maybe you can help correct me if I m wrong, but
so
On slide six, we see the chronic absence rate in Alaska is significant.
And I think that's something that the task force has been aware of,
which is why we are trying to address some of those concerns as we move forward.
But then on slides nine and then in the policy recommendations,
we say that high levels of absence reflect an erosion and positive conditions for learning.
and the four that are on the slide
are physical and emotional health,
adult student well-being, and Emotional Competence,
belonging and connection and support
and academic challenge and engagement.
And I feel like I've been to a lot of schools
and I felt like we're doing a lotta these four things.
I guess I don't see any of the other data
That's other states are doing that says how do you find out what of which of the four things are not happening?
Where are these four thing's not happen in Alaskan schools
I feel like that's the only connection I can make here is that if chronic absenteeism is at 50 percent
Then some of these for things aren't happening
Yeah, I like core connection
So I would say two things.
One is this is generally what we say
and you're gonna have to contextualize it locally
to figure out which of these things,
but I will also add in Alaska.
There's, and it's probably an accurate,
it is not as pleasant here as it should be.
There is an access to learning issue
that you guys have in Alaska
that is unlike any other place that I've seen.
Up.
the transportation challenges, the weather challenges. Those things actually, I will admit,
have really significant impacts on Alaska and they're probably not about what's happening within
schools, but what is happening for kids along the way to school. And I would add that as another
in pretty significant ways.
Another thing that I think you do have in Alaska
that among the groups that have the highest levels
of chronic absence, it's Native American Indian populations.
And some of that has been about
how do you connect the culture of school
and the conduct culture community?
and how you create these partnerships so school feels like it recognizes. It's connected the
issue of belonging, connection, support, but it's also I think sometimes we have to we haven't as
a country been very good about creating really effective ways so that our schools ensure that
as connected and supported and that what they're doing is I don't know so I'm just thinking about in one other this was in Minnesota and we had been working with native educators and a couple things had become really hard.
One was this and with a native educator herself every time she called a family she said the families were so worried that their kids were going to be taken by the child welfare agency.
even though she was native herself, because it was this history of distrust, she couldn't
communicate with them. And then when she tried to create an attendance messaging campaign,
at first what the elders in our community said, are you just trying to take our kids out of our
community? So they ended up having to come up with messaging that was really about helping kids and
was about helping them be successful in their own community and they also ended up using young
people as outreach for each other because to so that there was someone that they trusted when
there were issues and challenges going on that that could talk with. So I do think Alaska you
have some really unique both physical challenges, geographic challenges but there may be also
And what might be really helpful is seeing whether you can use your data to identify some of the places what I've seen is anywhere you go. There's only some places that are bright spots where they're finding ways to overcome these challenges.
support other communities. Thank you, Miss Chang. I just want to note for the
record that we were joined by Representative Bynum at 4.15 p.m. and we
have about 10 more minutes. So I'm going to ask if you might be able to to
keep your answers a little bit shorter just so that
we can get through the final questions from the committee. Any follow-up
representative reference? I'll let somebody else go. Representative Hymshu.
Thank You, Director Chang, I am back on slide seven again.
And we don't have to be on that slide.
I just want to know how we compare with other countries.
And I don' t mean Alaska at this point,
because Alaska already doesn't compare well with the nation.
But nationally, how do we compared with
other country's?
And that's a pretty broad statement.
So maybe pick a high-performing system.
If we measure schools by test scores,
then a higher-performing system would
be Finland or Singapore or something like that.
chronic absence data, the only places that I know
have some similar data and I don't know,
we don' t do that much international work.
I noted the UK and a lot of the former British colonies
because the United Kingdom has a similar 10% measure.
And I knew they've had some
similar levels of chronic abstinence.
I do not think most other countries
necessarily even calculate this metric.
Okay.
So I'm not sure that I can give you that comparison.
I am sorry.
A follow-up?
Yeah.
Thank you for that.
And then obviously the goal for chronic absenteeism is 0%, but what would be a reasonable target?
I mean, was there a period of time where we were crushing it and we had 1% chronic
absentee-ism and maybe, like you said, prior to 10 years ago we weren't really looking
at it.
But do you have any insight on what should we be aiming for?
What we've been aiming for is trying to get folks to reduce chronic absence by 50% over
a five-year period.
We've actually said that's a challenge that one can look and work on.
I think that I don't think it's going to be zero percent is not, they're going always
have some level of kids with challenges.
Being able to significantly improve the engagement in our communities and create those systems. So
We've been having folks think about how do you reduce chronic absence by five percent over five years?
If you're at about a 40 percent, that's like a four percent reduction every single year
Okay, thank you. I am so grateful for your
Background work on this and helping us understand the issue better
About a decade ago, I learned about a program called Co-Pilot that was in use in universities,
and then secondary schools started using it, and it was just a really targeted program,
whereas soon as a kid wasn't in school, it triggered a whole bunch of responses by the school.
Which, of course, took additional staff time. But do you talk at all or have any insight on
solutions to it? Or are you basically just helping folks quantify the problem?
So, if you look at that last slide, this is our attendance playbook where we've been trying to help to identify using research, what are solutions that work?
home visits, positive messaging, healthy school building.
You know, there's a set of things that you want to have as a kind of baseline that every kid gets.
Then there are tier two interventions in tier three.
We're actually in the process of trying to update that based on what we've seen with the newest research.
And then we do at times work with districts to help them.
create communities of practice with their schools,
with school teams, helping them to really take a look
at how do they understand and unpack what are the barriers
and then given what the barrier are,
think about what're the strategies
that they can use and implement.
Thank you so much.
Thank You, Director Chang.
Before we go to our last question
with Representative Ruffridge, I do have one.
that has been one that's been floated around here
in the legislature is we've been hearing
from some of our frontline staff that their interpretation
of the driver of chronic absenteeism has
been that there is really no intrinsic motivation
to come to school anymore.
The pandemic showed them that they can be successful
without actually being in attendance.
And there has some conversation about how do we incentivize
or potentially use
tactics that might penalize parents for not sending their kids to school such as
garnishment of state resources. We have something called a permanent
fund dividend that we could withhold from parents if their
kids had a certain number of days missed. Have you collected or seen any data
that talks about some of these other types of tactics or tactics around
incentivizing parents in encouraging attendance and potentially using a
Yeah, there is so what
There has been some research, for example, done in South Carolina, where they were trying
to take a look at, it's not just with parents, but with kids looking at what was the impact
of when you took kids to court, when put them in probation, how did that affect attendance,
and what they found, in that case, was that attendance actually got worse among those
And part of the reason, they think,
is because when you took that kind of punitive approach,
the courts and others were not actually
equipped to help improve and understand what the impact,
what was causing them to not show up to school,
and then come up with a solution that addressed it.
And often, sometimes it actually further stigmatized
a student actually at the school.
we had different notices of truancy and in, if you had three days missed or three times late
by class to class by 30 minutes, we would issue a notice which included if
you don't show up to school we're going to take you to court. And what happened with that
the standard one, which had been part of state legislation, was pretty threatening.
One was trying to put in really easy to understand parent language, hey, your kid missed school,
we're worried about you, can we help you? We have different versions of that. It turned out that
if you wrote the easy-to-understand, Hey, I care about to, and you shrunk all the legal language
to the bottom, that that actually had a 40% better attendance than when you started with threatening
if the key to improving attendance is building a relationship with families and kids so you know
what the challenges are and what motivates kids to show up to school what we found is when you
threaten them then families just um uh sometimes will even um feel further alienated and not sending
their kids into school so so far the research that we've done has not shown that positive
Thank you.
Thank You Exact Director Representative Ruffridge for the final question.
Thank-you Chair Tobin.
I had a different question but now after that last one I'm surprised by that answer because
the data that's in front of me which that is what we're looking for today and our first
And that we have to motivate kids to show up to school through these variety of means.
And I think that great teachers and great environment obviously helps kids want to be at school that I
think is true, but I
think all of the teachers I know, all the principals I
know they are all trying to do this exact thing every single day.
And when we as a task force are trying to decide how do we work on this 50% or 40% absentee rate,
what I do is I go back when
we did actually have in the United States or other places
some sort of stick, not court, court seems pretty aggressive,
but some kind of consequence for not attending school.
Many countries that excel in education, I think we talk a lot in this committee about Finland.
Finland has very serious consequences.
It's against the law for your children to not be in school.
This country used to have rules like that
where it was against a law
for children not to be at school,
and our chronic absentee rates were under 10%.
So the data would say,
actually quite the opposite of your answer,
which was that chronic absenteeism was lower,
and it has gone up as we have sort of
developed a culture of it's okay to not be in school
and that it is up to the teacher to make school to be awesome and fun.
Well school is not always awesome fun, sometimes it
is hard to get kids to want to go to school.
I'm a parent, I know how hard it
is every day to
get your kid up and say hey it
is seven in the morning, it
is time to
go school, usually their answer is
I don't want
to
go
to a school that is
every kid on the planet.
That was me.
Can I?
Yeah.
Can, I,
I'm struggling to mash up.
Yeah, now I want to clarify a couple of things.
I am not saying there shouldn't be consequences.
So two things,
I think as a community, we need to establish and help people understand that showing up
every day is really crucial.
And we've seen community wide campaigns where folks have done that.
Some of that is by making sure that like if kids are showing
someone's actually calling the school and talking and making sure the kid goes back to school.
Some of that is about having employers talk about and you can see it where, you know,
talking about the importance of showing up and that's something that they use when they're
hiring kids and your helping people understand that culture of going to
school, and the culture showing every day is an expectation. I've also seen, I was just at a
One of the things that's, this is more, what are the appropriate consequences?
This was a high school where what they do is when kids don't show up, they actually can't
show, up to the extracurricular or the sports activity, that day, and they have to have a plan
for actually getting back and showing up. And that they're pretty religious on saying
You know, if you're not showing up, the consequence is that you can't participate in
X. It's not a court solution.
It is not creating more barriers.
I worry that when we...
take out funding from families who are struggling on the edge and you make it even more harder to
keep their housing or their food or rent that you're actually creating more barriers,
but what are the appropriate consequences? The other thing that we've seen that has been really
hard that I think we have to figure out how do we talk with families about is that what they saw
this was at Chicago study again was that they say that when you correlated attendance to test scores
You still saw the more that you kids were not showing up to school, the worse their test scores.
You saw that correlation with grades, but every kid is getting better grades right now.
We also heard there's another effort that was learning heroes, and it's called false signals.
Kids stop, the test scores show worse learning
and the tests scores also show
that more kids aren't showing up to school
but more kid than ever we're getting bees.
So one of the challenges then
is are we accurately reflecting to families
where kids are at academically?
Are we accurate reflecting kids?
What they've lost in learning when they're not there?
There are consequences when kids don't show up.
They're not gaining the kind of skills they need to be successful,
but we don' t have great mechanisms right now for ensuring kids and families understand
what happened and how they were harmed by that and
how that is actually affecting their future.
And I think we do need
to think about what are appropriate consequences and
really is crucial and matters.
Thank you. Thank You, Executive Director Channing. Unfortunately,
we need to move us on to our next presentation, but we will share your contact information with
Task Force members and with other colleagues here that are listening in. As I know that there
are additional questions and insights that they wish to glean from your experience and from
the information that you've shared with us today.
Thank
you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and the great questions.
We are now going to move on to our next presentation,
which is addressing student homelessness
and housing insecurity.
We're joined by the Executive Director
of Schoolhouse Connection, Barbara Duffield,
who works to overcome homelessness
from prenatal to post-secondary.
She is joined
by our Anchorage School District Child
and Transition Program Coordinator, David Mayo-Keely,
and also the Program coordinator
for the McKinney-Vento Program
in the Keeneye Peninsula School Borough District, Kelly King.
All three presenters are joining us on Microsoft Teams.
Thank you so very much for joining
us this afternoon.
If you could please identify yourself with a record
and begin your presentation when you are ready.
Thank You very Much.
My name is Barbara Duckfield.
I'm the executive director of Schoolhouse Connection.
And again, thank you, Senator Tobin,
and members of the committee for the invitation
to join you tonight.
Kelly, Dave, and I have coordinated our presentations.
So I'll provide some background and some context.
I will turn it over to them to share insights
from their work and their communities.
They'll turn back over me if there's time
to show a few considerations for statewide policy.
But first we wanted to start with some
context about the number of students
homelessness in Alaska, which has increased in recent school years, as you can see from
the PowerPoint presentation. On the chart, showing the numbers, you
can the trend is upward since the pandemic. And I want to make one point about these data.
We do not view a rise in this homestudent numbers as necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
If increases are caused by better identification, better training,
better partnerships, resources, it's a positive sign that schools are in school,
that students are at school where they can receive support.
We need to know if students are experiencing homelessness so we can intervene to remove barriers
to attendance and help stabilize their education. And even if those rising numbers do represent
actual increases in family or youth homelessness, there's even more of a reason to make sure
the students enrolled in attending school because lack of high school degree is the single greatest
Now the slide, the next slide on chronic absenteeism shows what's publicly available on homeless
students in Alaska compared to all pre-K students. We don't have for the last few school years,
but you can see a very significant difference between all students and those who are homeless.
On the next slide, we have some data on where students are staying when they're first identified as homeless.
This reflects the federal education definition of homelessness, which is broader than the definition that the Federal Housing Agency uses,
and it better reflects reality for families in youth, namely that most students who are homeless are in hidden situations staying temporarily with other people due to lack of alternatives.
those who are in very substandard housing, which is a significant issue for child safety
and child well-being, especially in climates such as Alaska.
These are not static categories.
We know that families and youth often move between these living situations during a year.
Now, there are many ways on the next slide we'll share the ways in which homelessness
creates barriers to regular school attendance.
The constant moving around from place to place makes it very difficult to get to school
on a regular basis, and it can also cause children to disengage from school, especially
if every time they change where they're staying, they also change schools.
Certainly lack of transportation is a challenge in the context of mobility and Dave and Kelly will
share more about those issues in their presentations. Lack of clothing, hygiene, basic needs, caregiver
responsibilities, all of these are cumulative barriers. And also homelessness presents a
challenge to participating in sorts of opportunities that do engage students and connect them to school,
The next few slides I won't read to you. You have them. These are quotes from the young people that our organization directly supports through our youth leadership and scholarship program and they summarize more powerfully than I ever could how homelessness creates layers of barriers and compounding barriers that pile up and harm youth.
of bus drivers, unsafe living situations in general.
And then the slide after that, the statement from one of our students, I think the biggest
barriers to attending school of transportation, energy, and embarrassment.
And I want to note for him that the challenges didn't go away when you got housing.
He said, once I get out of homelessness, that trauma got in the way.
And some days, they'd be too anxious and depressed.
So these are cumulative barriers and homelessness is much more than just not having a place to
stay.
Fortunately, schools and states do have a powerful but often overlooked tool at their disposal,
and that on the next slide is the federal law the McKinney-Vento Act. This is both a blueprint
and a framework for reducing absences. There's a broad mandate for both the state education
agency and local education agencies to review and revise policies that act as barriers,
including barriers tied to absenses. And the centerpiece of the legislation really is school
If it's in the student's best interest or being immediately enrolled, the entirety of
the act is really about minimizing the disruption of homelessness and making schools an oasis
of stability in all of that.
The role of the liaison is critical, you'll hear more from Kelly and Dave about the role
of a liaison and making sure that students who are homeless are attending school.
Finally, before I turn it over to Kelly, I want to share a little bit about some of
the systemic barriers at the intersection of homelessness and attendance. The barriers,
lack of transportation, hygiene, all those other pieces are family and
careers. We have had the honor at Schoolhouse Connection and the pleasure of working with
Hetty and her amazing team at Attendance Works over the past two years on a project to better
understand and improve attendance for homeless students.
We spoke to school districts all over country and we found some clear patterns. First, very
often there are silos between homeless education staff and attendance teams within school
districts. They may have access to different data, they may work in different ways, under
So bridging those silos is central to solutions.
And we know that the school districts
that we're seeing results,
we really working closely across departments.
Second, we saw that very often broader states
or local attendance initiatives
didn't have an explicit consideration of homelessness,
which meant that some of the strategies
may not be reaching some
of students who have some other greatest barriers.
Third, we saw that homelessness may not be visible in state or local attendance dashboards,
both the data that's public facing, which, of course,
we have privacy suppressions, but also in the
data, that is internal to school districts and used for intervention.
And that access to real-time data is so important because attendance can be a way to identify
students who are homeless. So that an important piece. And then finally,
some of the most common ingredients for success were really the staffing
homelessness and some resources so that together they could identify and address those root causes.
So with that, I will pause and turn over to Kelly and then Dave to share more about their experiences.
Director Duffield, before you transition, may I ask for you just to give us a quick snapshot
of what federally we are seeing right now with McKinney-Vento funds?
no change in the level of McKinney-Vento funding. The funding package that the US House of Representatives
passed this week keeps the funding the same at $129 million and also makes some additional
positive changes in terms of allowing those funds to be used for short-term emergency
motels days and we'll see what the Senate does after the snowstorm next week. But right now
Ms. King, please identify yourself with a record and begin your presentation.
Thank you. My name is Kelly King and I'm the MVP coordinator for the Kenai School District.
We have an average daily attendance rate in Kenay.
Kena, I have just under 82% for our MVP students.
And given the challenges that many of our students in family space and getting to us every day,
I am very encouraged by that number.
I think it's really a signal to
us of how seriously our
students and families are taking their education when we see attendance outcomes in that way.
If you could advance to the slide on policy.
please. I did want to bring up that I think attendance is often considered to be a reflection
of student motivation, but when we're talking about students experiencing homelessness, I
think that attendance as often a reduction of Student Access to Education. And so in these
next few slides, i'm just going to highlight some things that Keena is doing to increase
that access to education and to support the attendance and retention of our unhoused students. So
First of all, in this slide, you'll see that KPBSD does have an active and very
alive policy and corresponding AR that directly speaks to the attendance of our
unhoused children. When students miss more than three
days that are not pre-planned or more
than a total of seven days in a quarter, staff are required to reach out to their
liaison and let them know. Skyview Middle School here in our
district is a great example. They really know and understand the weight that
this policy can hold when it's brought to life and so we frequently get calls
to have us check on students. What the meat of this AR does is it provides liaison the opportunity
to be as expeditious as possible and reaching out to families to look at attendance concerns
and gives us the opportunities to help remove barriers as quickly as
possible. When we reach out the families we often will hear that a vehicle has broken down or a
child is ill and they haven't been able to access medical care or they've had another unplanned
We can go on to the next slide.
I will talk specifically about transportation assistance.
It's one of the most critical things that we can do to make sure that our kids are getting into our buildings every day.
I'll hit on the first two that are listed there on that slide because they're the ones that most frequently utilized in our district.
The first is assigning, creating or amending bus routes to get our children who may be out of attendance area of their school back into that.
building for that school stability that Barbara mentioned is so critical to the academic success
and outcomes that we see for our students. We luckily have a really wonderful relationship with
our transportation coordinator. She's very well versed in the rights that McKinney-Vento students
have for the school of origin transportation and she really understands the idea of what's in
And so those routes are usually set up very quickly,
and we have great success in making sure
that kids can stay in their school of origin.
Another option that we provide is fuel assistance
for guardians or youth who are providing that transportation
to and from their School of Origin by themselves.
Oftentimes, as fuel assistants is when we know
that this will be a short-term plan, maybe a week or two,
where they're figuring out where
they are going to land or if a...
Another thing is waiting with busing to get set up but it's been very effective and again
maintaining that school of origin transportation without in this case having to create or amend
another route. If we could go to the next slide please. Really when you talk about McKinney
speaks to the topic we're talking about today, which is increasing attendance and retention of our
unhoused youth. So whether that is, as Barbara mentioned, access to extracurriculars, basic
backpacks and school supplies, any of the things you see, that's what we are really looking at.
An example I'll give has to do with access to laundry and shower services.
Recently we worked with a family who their child had been missing school and when we reached out,
we found out that their pipes had frozen and they didn't have water to
do laundry or to take showers. Mom was keeping her child home from school
out of fear that he would be mocked or ridiculed at school by his peers for
not having clean clothing or not being able to
take a shower. So we were able not only provide punch cards to
products and some additional clothing to help take some of the weight off of that family
and the child was able to return to school very quickly. We could go to the next slide.
One of things I am most grateful for in our district is that we are very lucky to have a
dedicated youth support specialist who works primarily with our unhoused middle and high
schoolers and specifically our unaccompanied homeless youth. These students often need the
member of ours is really able to come alongside them and provide these wraparound services and
to be an advocate at the district level. I could speak for an entire session on the impacts that
she makes for our youth, but I'll highlight a few of the things that she does.
in regard to attendance.
So you can see on this slide,
positive relationships with school staff.
We've talked so far in today's session
about the importance of having those positive connections.
And so our specialists will work with students
to identify staff in their building
that student views as a trusted adult
so that they know that
they have support in
their own building that
they can't see every day
and it really provides that engagement piece
for them on another level.
Another thing is setting student specific goals,
which do include attendance
our specialists make sure that these goals are meaningful and attainable and
we work in increments to build them up with a student as the year progresses and
then another thing that's been very beneficial to attendance is frequent
communication and ongoing needs assessment. This is a way for our
specialists to be very proactive and looking at what's currently happening in
the student's life and almost foresee what barriers may be coming down the
roads that we can address them before they actually become issues for students
A success story that I really wanted to share about the outcomes of what she's able to do with
students is we had an unaccompanied youth who was chronically absent the first semester of her
senior year to the point that graduation was really becoming a question of whether or not
that would happen for her. The student didn't have any adults in her life that were encouraging or
motivating her to attend school and she was losing that intrinsic motivation that we've
So our specialist made an arrangement where she would call the student from our program
cell phone at 5.30 every morning to make sure that the
student was getting up and getting ready for school. And it was rough for the first few weeks,
but after that, it became routine for
the students to the point that she was jokingly calling our staff to
make, sure, that he was
getting out ready
for work in the morning since so her attendance greatly improved.
As of course did her academic outcomes and she
she and the school give credit for that to the level of support that our specialist was able to
provide. And I often think about, we say her name is Nicole, but we're like, man, if we had
two or three more nicoles in our district, what are the impacts that we could make for so many
more students who could provide a level that deep and that trusting?
of support because for our students it doesn't just matter that it's a person
trying to reach out. They have to have trust and confidence that that person
is a safe person for them to go to that is consistent in their lives and
really does have their best interest in mind.
The next slide is going to be my last slide but
a consideration that I would have is just when decisions are being made about
any particular facet of public education and I'll use transportation as the
That might not automatically trigger thought that this is a homeless education
consideration when we think transportation, but for our students and our programs it very much is
with transportation when those
budgets are reduced that means that the number of buses and routes that are
available to our students on a district level are also reduced which then
makes providing that to and from school of origin transportation even more
challenging for us and when we recognize that those
buses are often the only mechanism that get our
students to are classrooms every day you can see how impactful that is and how
much it does ripple out across the system.
With that i'm going to stop my presentation and pass this along to David.
transition can you tell us how much you receive from the federal government for
your McKinley-Vento program? Sure our grant is approximately $28,000 for the
all of the services and supports that we offer to our students and then our
salaries for three staff members that have come out of Title 1A set-asides.
And how many students do you serve?
On average around 250 we this entire school year have been seeing a 30% increase in the number of students identified and so we are very much anticipating we'll be over 300 by the end of this school here.
Thank you.
Thank.
Thank, you, we have one question from representative him too. Thanks. I'll
be quick and this could go to either stepfield or Miss King. Nice to see you again.
Kelly.
Are we seeing an increase in the number of people served by the program
because we're better at finding the people who need the help or because
there are more people need to help? Have you been able to figure that out?
I will say for our district, we have been 18 years in this role.
And we've continually worked on getting better at spreading the word of our
program and the services that we offer. However, I think ultimately it is
circumstances we're seeing in our society and in
our communities that are triggering the increase in numbers. It's probably a
partnership between both of those but.
A lot of our families who maybe were hanging on and teetering on that edge for quite some
time now aren't able to stay on the edge of stable housing. And so we are seeing an increase
in my opinion about things that are happening with our economy and our housing situation.
Locally and Kenai, there are no available.
low income, let alone moderate income rental units available.
Weight lists are very long.
We don't have enough capacity for families to find them.
And so there's just so many layers of struggle,
but yeah, I don' t know if Barbara has anything to add to that,
but we're seeing both.
I'll just say I think it's a both and for sure.
Thank you. And I just want to let folks know
we have about 10 minutes remaining for this presentation.
Okay, hello, I'm Dave Mayo-Kylo of the Anchorage School District and you can go to the next
slide that says Child and Transition.
So I am the homeless liaison for the
So, this is the information about the Anchorage School District.
We have last year identified 1,880 students that were experiencing homeless at some point
in that school year.
That equates to about 4.3% of the anchorage student population.
And if you think of an anchored school that had 20 students in a classroom, which doesn't
happen very frequently, but that would be on average one student in each classroom was
experiencing homelessness.
Our students are spread out throughout the school district, but we have a significant
number that are meeting the definition. About 60% of our students qualify because they're
living in troubled up situations. They've lost thousands of their own.
They can't find a place in their homes.
They move in with friends or family members.
As I mentioned, they are extremely highly mobile. Last year, about 25%
of students told us that they had three or more different addresses
during the School Year and 14% reported four or four of more
to keep in direct contact with those students.
So as they're moving around Frankridge,
we continue to provide that transportation assistance
to get them to their school of origin.
But sometimes there's a delay in that
and that leads to some attendance misses.
It's really difficult at times for those
students as we are so frequently moving
to keeping in touch with us
and get that Transportation Assistance
so they can stay in their School of Origin.
We do have a number of our students who are chronically absent but overall for the past five years our overall attendance rate for our
students has been right around 82 percent and you can go to the next slide.
So as a staff what we do we, do regular attendance reports.
So I'll run a report from our student management system and it will show all the students that are
chronically abstinent and I will distribute that to our staff and they then reach out to those families to try to see why
why are they no longer attending school?
Sometimes we have to get really creative.
Sometimes it's because a car is broken down.
We can sometimes do car repairs for students and family
so that we can get them back to school.
Sometimes, it is rearranging the transportation.
They tell us they have moved.
And so, if we're doing a bus, we could reroute a buss.
We could use a taxi to the student to or from school,
it was just trying to be as creative as possible.
Sometimes its working with a family
because something has changed with them.
Maybe the child care that they had fell through
student is now providing childcare for the younger siblings.
We try to be creative.
We work with schools, anything that we can do
to try and find a solution to those problems.
We rely on community agencies quite a bit
to help us find those solutions.
We have good relationships with them
and we do a lot of work.
Trying to problem solve us best began to being creative
One of the biggest things we try
to do is to build the relationship with that family.
I think it was heady that spoke earlier
about sometimes families just stop answering those calls
district. One of the things we've done in recent years to have all my staff at cell phones,
a lot of our families will see that call come and Anchorage it's a 742 number and they don't
answer it because they're ashamed. They want to see their kids go to school but they are having
a problem doing it. It's my step will reach out via cell phone or slender text say hey what's going
on or something we can do we want help and we just want build that solid relationship for those
families so that they can get their children from school. Next slide please.
We also have at the high school level,
we have student support specialists.
And this is a program that's been in conjunction
with the English Language Learners Program
for by the past three years.
It started under
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from COVID funded. We've been able to keep it going since then. And these are dedicated staff
in our high schools that work directly with high school students. They also do regular
attendance reports on a weekly basis.They reach out to those students, they try to figure out what
is going on in their lives as to why they're not getting school.
We had a recent student who moved. Um,
they moved in zone, but it was a such a new place for them.
They didn't know where they lived.
They were a student that was displaced in the typhoon,
but they qualified for services for that student sports specialist,
schools and they can see exactly where they lived and then showed them how they
can get back to school the next day. Those students support specialists much
like Nicole and Aquinai is really about building those relationships with kids.
They have their office doors open. They lunch with students pretty frequently so
those students see that person as a friend in the school. Oftentimes as
people have said before a lot of our families have not the greatest historical
relationships the schools.
and so making sure that they have a key ally in those buildings is really, really important.
And then I just, final slide, I wanted to kind of share a success story.
We had a student last year, his name wasn't Thomas, but that's my son's name,
and it's easy to remember. But Thomas and his family provided us 17 different addresses
where they lived. They lived with friends, they live with family,
obviously very, very frequently. But we were constantly in touch with them. They
constantly reached out to us. And even though they had 17 different addresses,
Thomas made it to school 95% of the day is in the school year.
He missed the first three days of school because mom was late in growing him.
So after that his attendance was probably about 97 percent.
So there are success stories but really what it comes down to is the relationships that we
build with families and students to let them know we want to get them to school
and we are here to help and try to solve problems.
And that's all that I have I think it's back to Barbara.
And Dave before you leave us can you tell us how much you receive federally for the
We receive approximately $140,000 through the McKinney-Vento sub-grant.
This year it's a little bit different because deed was very generous and allocated extra funds to us this year because of our
So just to quickly conclude our presentation, we wanted to end with some broad considerations
for statewide policies or practices.
We will start by saying that it's important to look at what's in place now as well as
proposed policies with a homelessness lens to just make sure that our students experiencing
homelessness aren't inadvertently penalized for circumstances beyond their control, but
also so that schools don't have a disincentives to identify or enroll students who they may
Rather, we'd like to see homeless students be explicitly integrated in broader initiatives
and able to participate in them and benefit from them.
We also want to make sure that data is disaggregated so that we do have that
data on homelessness, that it's visible, to increase awareness and to inform action.
on the topic of resources. States can consider targeted resources in a number of ways,
whether it's funding formulas, oversight for the federal Title I dollars or others,
or pilot initiatives, for example, with housing agencies. I saw Bill introduced in the Oklahoma
about pairing eviction prevention with school sites,
for example, as a demonstration.
And finally, sometimes the policy and practice barriers
that prevent students who are homeless from coming to school
are created by
again, inadvertently by other sectors, so housing policies, homelessness policies
chow up for policies. For example,
so when we look at reducing chronic absence for students experiencing
homelessness, it's not just the education policies we need to
consider, but perhaps policies and other
sectors as well. So thank you very much for your time
and we will entertain questions if there's time.
Thank you. We unfortunately have one more
presentation that we have to fit in here that hopefully will be
I have a question from Senator Keel here that I also hope will be very quick.
Madam Chair, it's a questions for Mr. Mayor Kealy and feel free to get back to us.
If I heard right, you get $140,000 from the feds for homeless kids.
Your slide says 1,880 of those kids, surely you're not doing all this on 75 bucks a child.
the your district puts in as well. Thank you.
Yeah, and I can say that you know we also have a title one set aside which is required
and so we have I believe this year's allocation for us is 1.3 million
for our program as our title 1 set-aside and that covers all the staff salaries
and other services that we do. So the McKinney-Vento sub-grant is a portion of our funding
but certainly not all of it. Thanks.
Thank You. thank you for that. We are moving to our last presentation and
I apologize, policy analyst, Schwabak, which I've had someone provide to me several times
that I still think I'm saying incorrectly, that we do not have much time with you today,
but hopefully you can connect with our task force members individually if they have additional
questions to follow up on.
And I do apologize for some reason in my head.
I had it broken out in half hour increments, and it turned out it was actually, should
not a problem. How much time do I have approximately?
Oh, if you could keep your presentation to about 10 minutes.
All right. That's about where I was at.
My name is Juz Schwalbach.
I'm a senior education policy analyst with
recent foundation, a national nonprofit,
think tank, thank you to the coach at Oven and coach Mshoo,
members of the task force ability to speak today.
Since 2022, I've published an annual research paper,
but model open enrollment policies,
examining existing systems in all 50 states,
ranking and grading and comparing it with best practices.
So open enrollments is a policy
that lets students transfer to public schools
other than the resident should be assigned one.
There are two types, cross district,
let students transport to schools outside their district
while within district
let the students transferred to school
inside their districts outside of their kitchen area.
Overall, these policies are popular supported by research, especially when they maximize
students' transfer options.
Pulling from UW, November 2025 showed that about 64% of respondents, law students should
be able to attend to any public school, regardless of where they live, and national pulling from
September of last year by a choice of money cancelled.
Also shared that 74% percent of parents were schooled children, so put it strong.
and open enrollment proposal if they have been successful across the nation.
With 17 states strengthening their law since 2020.
Notably, the laws in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and with Dakota and West Virginia
were passed with significant bipartisan support.
And this policy's popularity isn't without cause.
As many fit students use it to attend schools that are the right fit for them.
So jump ahead to slide five here.
So the research on Oberlin shows that this is a policy that fosters excellence,
positive impact in students and schools,
a major driver of participation in this policy is access to websites.
For instance, data from Arizona,
Florida, and Texas show that the vast majority of students transfer to schools
rated as ARB on-state tests.
Similarly, Data from 2016 to 2021,
in California, a report there found that.
Nearly all students participating in the state's district of choice program transfer to schools with higher test school is
But better academics aren't the only recent students use these policies
Sometimes they're using it just to attend schools that are better fit and other times it's to escape bullying access college courses such as AP or the National Backboarder classes
Specialized learning and so forth in Wisconsin West Virginia students this policy to
shorten their commutes, whereas in Colorado and Massachusetts, students were using
into access smaller class sizes. Now, just a quick snapshot of the overview.
Working with the data from 19 states, we found that about 1.6 million students
used this policy to transfer schools. The orange on that slide is in the within-district transfers,
transfers. This happened at a much higher rate than cross district transfers and that's due to
proximity reasons like in all our equipment. You'll see that there's a lot of within district data
missing and it's because most states don't collect data on the district transverse.
Now the states with the highest participation rates are Colorado and Delaware and Arizona.
In Colorado about 28 percent of students are using public school open enrollment to transfer
Colorado and Delaware and Arizona didn't have an overnight long-term data shows that these
programs tend to scale up with time. For instance, in Wisconsin, their program was launched with
about 2,500 participants in the late 1990s, and now today it's nearly 62,000 students using it.
But this growth was very incremental, increasing only by about 13 percent
Mr. Schwab, just very quickly, as I see Alaska is gray here,
I'm assuming you don't report our in-district transfers
because we don't publicly release that data.
That is correct, yeah.
So, open enrollment participation also varies
a great deal by locale and population density.
So generally, students are transferring
to either nearby districts or schools
or to districts where their parents
are working inside those districts.
Students whose families are comfortable with reasonable
commutes can transfer to districts in various locales,
including rural ones.
Data from 19 states show that many students
used open a room to transfer schools in the rural areas.
Ten of these states rule districts
gain the majority of transfer statewide.
So this just illustrates that rule district
can benefit from open enrollment so long as they
within strength you bring to other communities.
So, we'll just talk briefly here about model policy.
We identify seven key elements to a strong open enrollment law,
and these provision safeguards between
schooling options and maximize
transparent security families' policy makers and taxpayers.
I'm not going to go into every single one of these,
but the most important ones are numbers 1 and 2,
statewide crossing within district open and rolling.
This just means that all districts participate in the program.
so long as space is available in their schools.
So this just ensures that students who want to transfer have the option to do so
this space allows. Currently 16 states have strong cross-district open
enrollment laws, 17 states
have strung within district open enrollment
laws and nine states will. Another thing I'll briefly note here is that
there are great transparent provisions in this metric as well at both the
state and local level. At the local-level
policies like districts of global capacity by grade level,
as well as their overall policies and procedures
and show that families know when,
where, and how to apply for transfers.
We'll jump ahead to slide 12.
So this next figure just shows
how these metrics are applied to state laws,
ranking them in order from best to last.
And I do want to emphasize though,
that these rankings do fluctuate each year,
as 17 states have improved their
lost since 2020. And just last year, nearly 100 open, what let the poses were introduced across 34
states. So I hope that there continues to be momentum in this policy area. But Arkansas or
Oklahoma, Arkansas and Idaho have the best laws. Unfortunately, Alaska is down there at the bottom
along with Maine, Maryland and North Carolina.
And Mr. Schwalbeck, I'm assuming that we don't have a ranking because we have no law,
which means that our districts are able to make the policy themselves.
So, yes, as we've noted, zero to 100 points of that's because there's no codified program,
although some districts do have their own open enrollment policies, they're just not codifying
its data.
Those are, of course, like Anchorage or Fairbanks and Scarborough.
So just looking forward to how Alaska could approve their policy, one would be to just
adopt a strong crossing within District Open enrollment policy that ensures student transfers
are free.
to them and their family, other states with many rural districts such as Montana and North
Dakota have robust overall policies that student wants students quite with use. For instance in
Montana in North Dakota the rural district seemed more students than they lost overall,
increasing their enrollments in Montana's case by about one student per district and seven
But at the very least, Alaska could adopt a robust within-district policy just as Nevada has
this past year. The reason I mentioned Nevada is because about 88% of Nevada's K-12 population
resides just in two counties. There is, similarly, in Alaska, it's about 74%
of Alaska's residents reside in non-little districts.
The Reason Nevada adopted this strong within district policies because they
Additionally, family friendly reporting provisions, like the ones I mentioned earlier, would be helpful for transfers, as well as state level transparency commissions as
well, that can inform policymakers and the public about how these programs affect students and districts.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you. I think we have time for one question. If anyone has a burning one from committee about it is otherwise
I see we
Have your contact information here and folks can follow up with you if they have additional concerns or considerations or questions that they might be able to ask
Representative Ruffridge
Thank You
Share Tobin, I guess just a quick question it seems to me that the number of school districts in the state
Even if the State is very rule would seem to
be a really important metric for the success
of an open enrollment law of the rural states
that you mentioned.
Do you know how many school districts
are present in those states?
On each one, I don't know that number offhand,
and that is true.
A higher number of districts would increase transfer rates.
Although it'll place like Montana, for instance,
I know they do have quite a few districts,
They're not as far apart as Alaska's districts, by any means,
but it's certainly quite a drive for the students that do transfer across district boundaries in that case.
Senator Keel.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Mr. Schwalbak, thanks for your presentation.
So one thing that's not in your slides is data on student achievement.
Can you provide that to us?
So unfortunately, I don't have data on that.
Okay, but I'd be happy to share that via.
Yes, that would be lovely if you could email that to me.
We will get that dispersed to task force members.
I thank you for your presentation, and I apologize again on my mismanagement.
It is our first committee hearing back.
And I need to do a better job at timing myself to ensure we have ample time for questions
for all of our presentations.
With that, we've concluded our agenda for today.
I do want to make a note of a few things.
I want ask our consultant, Matthew Turner, to hopefully help provide to the committee
as we continue our deliberations and our considerations about recommendations.
is if he would be able to collect district policies
or if they have adopted policies on parental outreach,
if there are consecutive misstays or collective absences.
So we can see if their is similar.
action that happens at the Keeneye Peninsula Schoolboro District occurring in our 51 other school districts across the state.
Additionally, I would ask our consultant, Mr. Turner, if he'd be able to also adopt the open enrollment policies for
intra-district for our urban core, as we saw in the most recent slide from this presentation,
communities, and I'd be curious to see if those districts have intra and inter-district
open enrollment practices that they've already adopted based on Alaska's omission of any
particular statute one way or the other.
Any other concerns or considerations that task force members would like us to collect
additional data from our Department of Education and Development, or from Our Consultant, Representative
Story?
Uh, Chair Dovin and the committee, I think it would be worthwhile to know, um, like
he and I, they identified students through their teachers that were homeless, Um, are
some, uh, students.
districts, do they have dashboards that they can break out the chronic absenteeism by which
grade how, you know, who has those resources, what do make the decisions on, and then how
many have dedicated youth support specialists through the Title I A funding would just be
nice to know what supports that we have out there.
Thank you and we can I think I believe we get that a mixture from the Department of Educational Development and also if we
Can't find that information we will help collect that and get the discourse to task force members any additional questions or
Lines of inquiry task first members would be interested in pursuing
Representative Hymshu, thank you chair Tobin
Not sure if I'm saying the same thing, but I am curious how we quantify it at the state level so
You might have just said this. I'm not sure if I am repeating. Anyway, if a kid is absent for travel,
if the kid as absent, for family travel. If the kids absent. For sports travel
Is that quantified anywhere in our state?
That's what I need to know.
Yes, and hopefully Mr. Turner will be able to collect that information for us on district policies and get that to us so we can understand what the current scope might be.
With that, this concludes our meeting for today.
The next task force meeting is scheduled from Monday, February 16th.
At that meeting, we will focus in on the issue of local contributions to public education.
And this will, for folks, edification will take place of the regularly scheduled Senate Education Committee.
As there is no other business before the committee day, I will adjourn us at 5.17 PM.