Tuesday marks 100 days of the second Donald Trump presidency. And in that time, he’s shaken up a lot of things. That includes education. Amid a flurry of federal directives, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s superintendent says he’s keeping focus on students.
Clayton Holland’s no stranger to professional growing pains. He was hired as the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District’s Superintendent in the throes of the pandemic. In that time he has fought false narratives about critical race theory and most recently has worked to increase school funding as the district faces a $17 million budget deficit.
And this year, he says multiple federal education initiatives have added to the district’s workload.
“It's the uncertainty of things that I think is causing the most stress, or particularly when this first started happening, that staff are stressed about,” he said. “On top of, right, we add on all this other stuff that's going on with our state budget and just changes and everything.”
A week after he was inaugurated, President Trump issued, then waffled on, a nationwide freeze on payments on federal grants and other programs. At the time, Holland said the district’s two biggest pools of federal funding, which serve low-income students and students with disabilities, were safe.
But now, he says that uncertainty is something his team is factoring in. For example, the district is eliminating some federally-funded employee positions next school year. That’s because the funding is no longer guaranteed, and the district doesn’t have enough of its own money to staff them.
“Our fear really is that we bring contracts forward and personnel action items forward on federal programs folks, and then something gets cut over the summer, and we know we're in a really tight situation already, so to take on more staff than what we can afford is our fear,” he said.
Just last week the school board issued some of its non-tenured teacher contracts. The board president said those contracts represent the bare minimum teaching services the district needs for next year.
In February came the federal education department’s “Dear Colleague” letter, which outlined a directive to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at schools and colleges. Holland says a review of district policies didn’t find any areas of concern.
But they did implement one change Holland says they’d already been considering – the name of the district program that serves students experiencing homelessness. The program used to be called “Students in Transition.” But Holland says some mistakenly believed the program was serving students transitioning genders.
“We went ahead and moved forward with it, because, one, we actually don't want that to get flagged by, you know, however this is all being searched out,” he said. “That – it's not that kind of program.”
Holland hasn't handled every situation the same way other Alaska superintendents have.
Unlike the Anchorage School District, for example, he says the district isn’t putting out any declarative statements on immigration protections for students. That’s because he says students are already protected by FERPA, or the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. That’s federal legislation that protects the privacy of student education records.
“People can't just come in and know our students are there or what room or who they are, and that's something we have to hold on to,” he said. “That's just a foundational right for every parent. Every parent needs to know we're not going to give information to just anybody who asks. We can't do that. We're not legally allowed, and I think morally and ethically, it'd be the wrong thing to do.”
He says the district hasn’t experienced any such encounters on the Kenai Peninsula.
Holland says he’s faced public pressure to take a more assertive stance against some of the federal actions – forgoing federal funding rather than comply. But he says people don’t realize how doing so could negatively affect the district’s most vulnerable students.
“It's a different game when you realize what's at stake,” he said. “You know, are we going to continue to provide services or not? And we're going to provide services to our kids. That's number one.”
Even beyond 100 days, Holland says that priority won’t change.
