Alarm clocks all over the Kenai Peninsula this morning heralded the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. The biggest difference between the sound of those earlier alarms on the Kenai, however, and most everywhere else around the country, is just how expansive an area is canvassed by their cacophony. Out of 16,800 school districts, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District is the 10th largest in the United States.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise though, considering Alaska’s landmass. In fact, the top 14 largest school districts by geographic size, and 23 of the top 30, in the United States are all from Alaska, with the KPBSD checking in at #10. Why is that significant? Because managing 42 different schools spread out over nearly 25,000 square miles comes with a host of challenges with which few other districts outside of Alaska must contend.
“It’s a large area. I think sometimes people forget that we’re not just all Soldotna, because if you were down in the states, if you were in Montana, this would be a district right here, Kenai would be a district, Nikiski would be a district, and so on,” KPBSD Superintendent, Clayton Holland, said Monday on KSRM’s Morning Update. “That’s really one of the focuses that we’ve had in the last couple of years, is we’re one district. We’re all united, and we’re all working together.”
For a district roughly the size of the state of West Virginia, things like logistics, scheduling, as well as the synchronization of curriculum and alerts take on a unique degree of difficulty. (That is by no means an exhaustive list, but some of the issues with more notable strain in a district the size of KPBSD). Or, as Holland puts it, the struggle is in maintaining “the same equity in the services of what we provide.”
Equity in services like food, which has to be distributed to all 42 schools, by land, air, or water; or maintenance, which has to be dispatched in an efficient and timely manner regardless of whether borough maintenance staff are being dispatched to Soldotna, Kenai, Nanwalek, or Tyonek; or even something less tangible, like a school year calendar which allows for the diverse cultural and religious traditions of the varied groups of people one might expect.
“You know, that’s part of that diversity of this district, and the distance,” Holland said. “But also the different cultures and different people living in those locations comes with different calendars. So, I don’t know any other districts are running multiple calendars like we are, so we’re really trying to meet the needs of every community the best that we can.”
With an estimated enrollment of more than 8,000 students for the 2023-24 school year, the challenge is set for KPBSD leadership and administration to facilitate what most other districts around the nation probably couldn’t even imagine. It’s a tall order, but Holland is proud of the way KPBSD has handled the challenges;
“We’re so large that it could be something completely different in Homer, then [Soldotna], or Seward, or across the water. We might get a call in the morning saying, ‘Hey, Tyonek is without power,’ and so having to make those decisions on such a wide area I think would be one of the biggest challenges. That, in-time, as-it’s-happening kind of decision, but I think we handle that really well.”