An Anchorage Assembly member wants to change the way school board members are elected.
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Currently, all school board seats are at-large, meaning all Anchorage voters elect them. A proposal from Assembly member Donald Handeland would instead have school board members elected to represent different Anchorage areas.
“I’m not insinuating that school board members don’t represent the full district or they’re not thinking about the full municipality,” he said during a Thursday work session. “But are residents getting that full representation when they don’t have someone who is local to their area representing them on the school board?”
Handeland represents the Chugiak-Eagle River area. And under his proposal, each of the Assembly six districts would have a corresponding school board member, while a seventh seat would be at-large. He noted that the Mat-Su and Kenai Peninsula boroughs both have district-specific school board members.
During Thursday’s work session, Handeland that looked at where individual school board members lived over the past 20 years, using the city’s six Assembly districts. In some years, there were instances where as many as three of the seven school board members lived in the same district, while one district — District 3, representing West Anchorage — had 10 years with no board member from that area. However, the data did not take into account the changes in district boundaries that occurred in 2022 when District 1 — representing North Anchorage — was made larger to add a second Assembly seat for the area.
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Anchorage School Board member Kelly Lessens did not take a position on the proposal at the work session, but told Assembly members that the city’s framers designed the school board to be responsive to the whole community.
“It was intentionally written into the Anchorage Municipal Charter to have board members serve the district as a whole because we must look at the district as a whole,” Lessens said. “We must budget for the district as a whole. We must focus on student outcomes for the district as a whole.”
If Handeland’s proposal is approved, there would be three at-large school board seats in the 2027 Anchorage election. After that, 2028 and 2029 would have two district-specific seats up for election, while 2030 would have two district-seats and the one at-large seat.
A public hearing for Handeland’s proposal is scheduled for Nov. 4. If approved, voters would decide on the change in April.
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