North Star Elementary staff walked back and forth moving pallets, furniture and boxes as they prepared to close the school in the final days of moving.
“I’ll be part of working over the summer to get everything officially out of here and probably the deep clean before we hand it back over to the borough,” said Victoria Christiansen. She used to be a librarian for the school. “Each building has their own community, their own feeling, their own – and we will rebuild – it’s Kodiak. It’ll be fine.”
It was still a tense day for her though.
Christiansen has four kids, all of whom were North Star Navigators. Two of them were still there this past school year. One of her favorite parts of working in the school was knowing she could see her kids any time.
Starting this fall though, she’ll only be at the same school as one of them.
Kodiak Island Borough School District’s school board voted to close North Star in January in an effort to drastically cut costs. At the same time, it also voted to separate the two remaining elementary schools in town into lower and upper grades.
East Elementary will serve the town’s kindergarten through third grade students, and Main will serve the fourth and fifth grades. That leaves much of the town schools staff shuffling around and parents adjusting to new routes to drop off their kids.
Christiansen and one of her kids are headed to Main, but her youngest will go to East Elementary. She said she trusts her colleagues, and that working together needs to be the focus, but she’ll still miss that extra time with her kid.
“It makes me sad I won’t be with my kids all day, every day – especially when my first grader has a meltdown and is bawling his eyes out,” she said. “I’m not going to be there anymore to just give him the hug he needs to keep going. Those are the little things that really make me tear up.”
Christiansen won’t be a librarian anymore either. When she gets to Main, she’s going to be an aide for special education.
“I waited for this position and assumed it would be like my retirement, like I would start there and finish there, and so that little dream I had kind of got taken, but hopefully it’ll come back in a couple years,” she said.
She’s not the only one getting moved around either.
East Elementary’s principal Melissa Griffin, won’t have that job for much longer.
“I won’t be the principal here next year,” Griffin said. “Next year, I’ll be taking on the instructional coach at Peterson Elementary.”
That means she won’t even be working at a town school anymore. She’ll be joined by a handful of familiar faces from East going to work at the school near the Coast Guard Base, about a 15 minute drive away.
That change is coming after decades of her being part of the school.
“I’ve been at East for 20 years in some way, shape, or form, as a paraprofessional, as a parent, as a PTA member, as a teacher, 10 years in Kindergarten, and in leadership for 3 years now,” she said.
She spent her last days as principal helping teams move things around and keep things running smoothly. Griffin said even though she won’t be working at East anymore, she’s still hopeful that restructuring schools can have some net positive outcomes.
“You have three schools, town schools, turning into two town schools so I’m excited to see how traditions change and what we add and what things we get to enjoy and share that are special about East to our North Star and Main teachers coming in,” Griffin said.
There are a few folks that aren’t getting moved around though.
“It’s not an easy change,” said Sarah Powers, a fifth grade teacher at Main Elementary. “I think there’s a lot of emotions, there’s a lot of unknowns at this point.”
She said one of her goals next year is to make the kids coming to Main feel as welcome as possible.
Her kids went to North Star when they were younger, and Powers said there are a lot of opportunities to build new things together.
“I am excited to meld a little bit with North Star, the culture that I knew as a parent and now Main, the culture I’ve known as a teacher, and then East, well I went to East as a kid,” she said.
Powers said she’s excited to work with the other fifth grade teachers much more often than before, too. And she knows there’s going to be bumps along the way, but the extra collaboration could help kids adjust too.
“I do think that there’s going to be a lot of upsides to this change. That said, I’m not naive, and I do think that there’s going to be challenges that we don’t even know about yet,” Powers said.
She said she’s ready to face those challenges head on when they happen. The new school year starts in mid-August.
