Ketchikan has joined the growing list of Alaska communities losing schools to declining enrollment and budget deficits.

The Ketchikan Gateway Borough school board voted unanimously on April 8 to close the Fawn Mountain and Point Higgins elementary schools for the 2026-2027 school year. The closures will move about 400 students into other schools.

Ketchikan’s educational offerings this year include four elementary schools, a middle school, high school, an alternative school and two charter schools.

The school board last year restructured the district’s elementary schools in an effort to save money but it wasn’t enough to balance the budget.

This year’s budget work for the 2026-2027 school year started with an $8 million deficit.

Closing the two schools will save an estimated $3.3 million, according to district budget documents reported by the Ketchikan Daily News last week.

In addition to declining enrollment and higher costs, the district is under a three-year plan to pay back more than $5 million it owes to the borough.

Even with the school closings, the district was $1.2 million short of a balanced budget, with further work scheduled on the spending plan before submitting a final budget to the borough assembly.

Students from the two schools set to close will be moved to the district’s other two elementary schools, and sixth grade classes will be added to the middle school and junior high.

The Ketchikan district has lost close to 20% of its student count in the past 25 years, which is similar to some and better than several other districts in the state.

The enrollment decline in Anchorage since 2001 is under 20%, down from about 49,000 to 42,000.

The Juneau school district lost more than 30% of its enrollment between 2001 and this year, according to state and district reports.

Wrangell’s enrollment has dropped more than 40% from 464 student in the 2001-2002 school year to about 260 this year, according to Alaska Department of Education records. The student count has held steady the past few years.

The Wrangell district, which will consider its 2026-2027 budget at a school board meeting on April 20, showed more than a $600,000 deficit, or 10% of its budget, in its most recent draft spending plan.

State aid, which is the largest single source of funding to Alaska public school districts, is based on enrollment numbers.

“It’s almost like every district in the state of Alaska does not have the funds they need to run the district to support their students,” said Jordan Tabb, a member of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough school board, as reported by radio station KRBD.

The state needs to increase its funding, he said. “We can’t charge tuition, we can’t run bake sales.”

The Alaska Legislature last year approved a substantial increase in the state’s per-student base funding formula, but education advocates say it is not enough to maintain quality schools. They are back before the Legislature this year for another increase.

An aging population, fewer births and a net loss of residents to outmigration for the past 13 years — more people leaving the state than moving to Alaska — have whittled away at school populations.

On the Kenai Peninsula, four public schools will close this summer, while others face cuts to librarians, pool facilities and extracurriculars, based on the spending plan approved by the school board this month.

The budget assumes less money from the borough and the state, and could be revised if additional funding comes through.

The district assumes it will save $2 million a year from the school closings, according to reporting by Kenai radio station KDLL.

Cat Cramer, the parent of a fifth grader at Sterling Elementary School on the Kenai Peninsula, said her family has been weighing a tough choice if their neighborhood school closes.

“We're going to move,” she said. “And not around here, because this district isn't supporting students in the way that I support. We've got family down in good districts in the states, and so you guys are going to lose families.”

In Fairbanks, the school board voted last year to close three schools effective with the 2025-2026 school year in an effort to cope with declining enrollment and budget deficits.

In 2024, the Juneau school board voted to consolidate the community’s two high schools into one and consolidate the town’s two middle schools into the closed high school building to save money.

The Anchorage school board voted in February to close three elementary schools at the end of this school year. Parents of students in one of the schools filed a lawsuit this month in an attempt to block the closure.