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Alaska has joined a growing number of states that are considering cellphone restrictions in schools. The Alaska Board of Education has directed the state’s education department to create a policy to limit the use of cellphones in schools during class hours. Currently, there is no statewide cellphone policy in Alaska, and any restrictions must be set at the district or school level. Several already do that, including Wrangell middle and high schools. “The Stikine Middle School is cellphone, earbud free,” said Greg Clark, who serves as princ...
Alaska’s Department of Health is again slipping into a backlog of food stamp applications. The news comes from state data included in a filing from the Northern Justice Project in its class-action lawsuit against the state. The suit asks the court to make sure the state issues food stamp benefits on time after years of chronic delays. Attorney Nick Feronti represents the class of Alaskans affected by the backlog in the department’s Division of Public Assistance, which manages the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for the sta...
Alaska was the second state to adopt ranked-choice voting in federal and statewide elections, but it may be the first to abandon it. A citizen’s initiative ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system made it to the November ballot after legal challenges. As a result, Alaskans will be asked in Ballot Measure 2 to decide if they would like to repeal or keep the state’s open primary and top-four voting system. If the repeal is successful, Alaska would revert to primaries that are controlled by the p...
In House District 1, which includes Ketchikan and Wrangell, there is a three-way race to replace Rep. Dan Ortiz who served as the district's House member for a decade. The race is between Republican Jeremy Bynum and independents Grant EchoHawk and Agnes Moran. All three candidates are Ketchikan residents, as is Ortiz. A Wrangell resident has not held the House seat since Peggy Wilson a decade ago. Ortiz is not seeking reelection, citing health reasons. The former educator caucused with the...
A pair of Tlingít villages in Southeast Alaska will receive apologies for past wrongful military action from the U.S. Navy this fall. The first of those apologies took place in Kake on Sept. 21, where U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark B. Sucato acknowledged the harms of a bombardment in 1869. An apology in Angoon is scheduled for Oct. 26, the 142nd anniversary of the 1882 bombardment of that village. Navy Environmental Public Affairs Specialist Julianne Leinenveber said it was determined that the...
More Alaskans will be eligible for food stamps and access to health care for school-age children and young adults will increase under a new state law. Gov. Mike Dunleavy sponsored the original legislation, whose goal was to expand the services covered by Medicaid to include things like workforce development and food security. The bill takes advantage of a federal waiver that allows states to consider the underlying causes of ill health in granting benefits. The legislation was amended to include a proposal from Anchorage Rep. Genevieve Mina...
At the height of the food stamp backlog last November, pro bono attorneys and other volunteers at Alaska Legal Services got more than 600 requests in one month from Alaskans seeking a fair hearing to get their overdue food benefits. So the 97 requests that came in this July didn’t feel like anything the group couldn’t handle, said Leigh Dickey, the nonprofit’s advocacy director. But the number is still alarming, she said, and it’s double the past month’s requests. Dickey said the state’s Division of Public Assistance is still dogged by t...
Formline carved paddles, beaded slippers, and a small totem were among the items returned to Kake in early August by a Quaker woman whose ancestor taught in the mission school there in the early 1900s. Joel Jackson, the tribal council president for the Organized Village of Kake, said it is nice to have the objects home. “That wasn’t meant for somebody else to display in their home as an artform or whatever. That’s sacred to us.” He said the village is working on repatriating other objects that are held privately or in museums across the cou...
All but seven of the 56 books the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District removed from school libraries must be reshelved, pending a trial next year, ruled U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason on Aug. 6. The banned books, including well-known titles like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” were removed from schools last year without individual consideration of their content after parents and community members complained of “LGBTQ themes” or sexually explicit con...
The Alaska Legislature recently increased state funding for domestic violence and sexual assault efforts, but a leading advocate says the effort doesn’t go far enough to meet the need. One of the main federal funding sources for Alaska’ domestic violence and sexual assault prevention efforts and programs has dropped over the years, creating a hole in service providers’ budgets as state funding has remained the same for seven years. Lawmakers plugged part of the that hole with a $3.7 million budget boost this year for the Alaska Council on Domes...
Alaska’s U.S. House race will be one of the hardest-fought campaigns in the country, according to a national group dedicated to getting Republicans elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s for that reason the National Republican Congressional Committee launched its first television ads in the general election cycle in Alaska before any other state, according to a news release. The television ad labels incumbent Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola a “devout Biden enabler” who would “betray Alaskans to back Biden.” It includes Peltola say...
Alaska voters are set to have an opportunity in the November election to affirm or repeal the state’s use of ranked-choice voting, Division of Elections officials confirmed on July 24. The news comes after Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin on July 19 disqualified some of the petition signatures collected by the repeal effort because the gathering process was not carried out in accordance with state law. The judge found instances in which the signature-gathering process was improper and disqualified those petition booklets. She ordered s...
When the only preschool teacher left Harold Kaveolook School in Kaktovik, a village of around 250 people on the northern coast of Alaska, Chelsea Brower was in charge. It was January and she had been the preschool aide for about a year and a half. “Being with the kids and trying to be their teacher is what really made me realize I want to be their teacher — and it also made me realize I need to become certified to be their teacher,” she said. The only problem was that universities that offered the requisite courses were hundreds of miles away,...
Of all the courses offered by the Della Keats precollege program, the three high school students in the University of Alaska Anchorage lobby were most struck by the cadaver lab in their anatomy and physiology course. It’s not the kind of opportunity students from rural Alaska usually get, which is the point. Bristol Albrant, a 16-year-old from Ketchikan, said the experience was indescribable. “That’s definitely not normal,” she said. For Tanya Nelson from Napakiak, it was her first time seeing a cadaver. “Probably most of our first time,” sh...
Unless Juneau’s city assembly makes the change first, a proposal to forbid cruise ships on Saturdays will be on the municipal ballot in October, but a Sitka push to put cruise ship passenger limits on that town’s ballot has been denied. They are the latest steps in a broader reckoning in some Southeast communities about the effects of increased traffic from cruise ship tourism. Cruise ship passengers are a mainstay in the regional economy. But people like Karla Hart in Juneau say increased passenger numbers come at a cost to quality of life. “I...
On a life-flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Sierra Ott’s newborn son Liam would not stop bleeding from a routine needle prick. Doctors in the Anchorage neonatal intensive care unit diagnosed him with a blood clotting disorder. Without medication, he is at risk of extreme joint pain and even bleeding out from what would not normally be serious injuries. Ott said that without health insurance from her husband’s military service, the pills would cost the family about $8,000 a month. At the urging of her case worker, Ott applied for Medicaid for...
Alaska lawmakers have overwhelmingly voted to support a federal proposal that would investigate and document the forced assimilation of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children in government-funded boarding schools. The legislative resolution acknowledges the trauma Indian boarding schools inflicted on Indigenous communities in Alaska and across the country, said the bill’s sponsor, Bethel Rep. CJ McCormick. There were more than 100 government-funded, church-run Alaska Native boarding schools in Alaska from the late 1800s t...
Lawmakers have sent to the governor legislation that would increase insurance coverage for birth control. A large bipartisan majority of the Senate approved the measure on May 9. Alaskans may access up to 12 months of contraceptives at a time and without a co-pay from pharmacies in the state if Gov. Mike Dunleavy signs the bill into law. The House approved Senate amendments to the bill on May 10. House Bill 17 requires health insurance companies to cover contraceptives without a co-payment and to retroactively cover existing prescriptions when...
State lawmakers have added protections to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people in Alaska, a move celebrated by activists who have devoted years to a campaign for equity. Senate Bill 151 passed with a combined 57-1 vote earlier this month. Under the new law, the state must employ two full-time, dedicated investigators to pursue cold cases and must include cultural training in police officer training. It also establishes a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Review Commission and requires that state public safety...
More Alaskans will be able to access food stamps following lawmakers’ vote to raise the income limit to qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The change comes after more than a year of extreme delays in food stamp distribution across the state that left thousands of vulnerable Alaskans without aid for months at a time, driving many into debt and inundating food pantries with food insecure families. State workers caught up on the backlog in March. Alaska will join 42 other states in using an approach called “broad-based cat...
Lawmakers have added four Alaska Native languages to the state’s official language tally and renamed the council that advocates for their survival and revitalization. Members of the Senate approved their version of House Bill 26 with a unanimous vote on May 6. State representatives concurred with the changes on May 10, which means it goes to Gov. Mike Dunleavy next. The House passed the original bill, sponsored by Juneau Rep. Andi Story, last year with a 37-1 vote. Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman was the lone no vote. In addition to a...
Before an advanced Tlingít language class, Raven Svenson and her classmate discussed how to conjugate the verb "boil" in the context of cooking. The University of Alaska Southeast class in Juneau was headed into finals last week and students were preparing for dialogues that will test their conversational skills. Professor X̱'unei Lance Twitchell walked in and suggested the specific verb for cooking meat by boiling. He answered a few questions in English, then switched to Tlingít as he st...
State legislators said they are unlikely to immediately act to address an Alaska Superior Court ruling that struck down key components of the state’s correspondence schools programs — and will wait for the Alaska Supreme Court to consider the issue. Speaking to reporters on April 17, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said his administration is also waiting for the high court to take up the issue. The ruling said the state’s cash payments to the parents of homeschooled students violates constitutional restrictions against spending state money on private and r...
An Anchorage Superior Court judge has struck down an Alaska law that allows the state to allocate cash payments to parents of homeschooled students, ruling that it violates constitutional prohibitions against spending state money on religious or private education. “This court finds that there is no workable way to construe the statutes to allow only constitutional spending,” wrote Judge Adolf Zeman, concluding that the entire law must be struck down. The April 12 decision has major and immediate implications for the more than 22,000 students en...
Opponents of Gov. Mike Dunleavey’s proposal to criminalize unpermitted street protests and other activities that block passage through public places said it is unconstitutional, too vague and too broad to become law. If Senate Bill 255 or its companion, House Bill 386, is passed into law, certain types of protest could be counted among the state’s most serious crimes. Dunleavy has said the bill is aimed at increasing public safety. It would impose penalties for blocking highways, airport runways and other public places if it causes sig...
