After the COVID-19 pandemic sent thousands of Kenai Peninsula students home from school, more than $30 million in federal pandemic aid flowed into the district. It paid for remote learning setups and to keep staff employed and it helped stave off budget cuts that have prompted tough conversations in recent years.
At first, it was just supposed to be an extended vacation. What started as one week away from school in March became three. But even after that, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District schools stayed closed.
More than 8,000 Kenai Peninsula students had already been learning remotely for 10 school days when Gov. Mike Dunleavy closed public and private K-12 schools statewide Apr. 13.
In 2020, Amanda Adams was the district’s lead innovation designer, in charge of all things virtual learning. And when it became clear kids wouldn’t be going back to school anytime soon, Adams says her job ramped up.
“Everything closed down over Spring Break that year,” she said. “It was two weeks that we were given leeway by the state to do some professional learning for teachers and get everything prepped to make that shift for complete remote learning delivery until the end of the school year and so on.”
She and a group of other senior district employees created what came to be called the Online Learning Conference. It was a digital boot camp to help teachers learn how to use Zoom, Canvas, Google Classroom and other online learning tools. When students started remote learning, she says it was a seven week sprint to the end of the school year.
The district got almost $32 million across three pieces of federal legislation. Each round of funding had different strings attached and was meant to serve a different purpose.
The first round was a little over $2 million through the CARES Act. That went to immediate pandemic response – moving more than 10,000 students and staff to Zoom. Buying and distributing Google Chromebook computers to every student. And sending out personal protective equipment to the network of 42 schools spread out across a geographic area the size of West Virginia.
Clayton Holland took the helm of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District smack dab in the middle of the pandemic. Before that, he was the district’s director of student support services.
“It went to all those immediate needs as, you know, the pandemic unfolded and we pivoted to the remote learning aspect,” he said.
The shift was easier in some communities than others..
”Geographically, depending on where a certain person's house is, you may or may not be able to get a cell signal down there very well,” Adams said. “And we live on a mountainous, you know, peninsula, so it just makes it a little bit not consistent, you know, as to whether or not someone's going to have good connectivity or not.”
Connecting kids to the internet was a combined effort between the school district and the Kenai Peninsula Borough. The district set up central wifi locations that families could drive to and get connected. The borough spent almost two and a half million dollars putting up six communication towers in remote communities.
But while the initial round of federal COVID dollars helped pay for immediate pandemic relief, later funding rounds helped address bigger pieces of the district budget.
Holland says it’s important to remember the poor financial situation the state and district were in at the pandemic’s onset. At the beginning of 2020, the district was preparing for 20% across-the-board reductions.
“We were in a bad spot,” he said. “So this funding, you know, did help.”
The district got a little over $9 million from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act. And then another $20 million through the American Rescue Plan.
Some of that money went to technology and software. But most of it went to employees.
Like a lot of districts around the state and country, enrollment in the district’s brick-and-mortar schools plummeted during the pandemic. At the same time, enrollment in Connections, the district’s home-school program, soared.
And when the district made requests for more funding to the borough, it was pushed to use COVID relief funds to fill in some of the gaps. The district used its second round of federal COVID funding to salaries and benefits for almost 90 employees it had previously planned to lay off.
But the largest chunk came through ARPA – more than twenty million dollars. But this time, there was a catch. Twenty percent of the money had to be put toward student learning loss. Because while remote learning helped connect teachers and students online, Adams says the system wasn’t perfect.
“Educators are beautiful professionals at targeting the needs of students, and when you are forced to only use one aspect or another, then you are limiting what's available,” she said. “Therefore it's not going to be appropriate or particularly effective for every single kid.”
To cover the learning loss requirement, the district created summer programs geared toward literacy, credit recovery and social and emotional wellness.
Now, the school district doesn’t have any more pandemic relief money to help fill in budget gaps. This year, they faced a $17 million shortfall. And as School Board President Zen Kelly said earlier this year, savings and federal dollars aren’t able to save the day.
“Over the COVID pandemic, we had the federal money, and we were able to leverage our savings accounts and the federal money in order to take these gambles until we finally got our answer from the state, albeit in one-time funding sometimes, but we were able to hedge our bets,” he said.
State lawmakers increased school funding this year, but the issue continues to be a point of contention between districts that say they’re cutting operations to the bone and the state’s executive branch that says money won’t solve problems.
Adams has a new job title now, which she likens to the principal of the district’s virtual learning program. For the most part, instruction is back to prepandemic business as usual. But she says the district’s facing a new set of challenges that she’s using her pandemic experience to address.
“We were going to get through the COVID thing together, and I feel like this next round of challenges, we're going to get through it together,” she said.
That was the fifth installment in a new reporting series by KDLL called “What a Relief,” which looks at the impact and legacy of federal COVID-19 relief funds distributed to the Kenai Peninsula. Tomorrow, we’ll learn more about whether recipients think the relief they received ultimately made a difference. This reporting is supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.
