Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Saying they were shocked to recently learn that the Haines Borough might sell Mosquito Lake School, upper valley residents – including young parents toting babies – turned out Tuesday night to organize and appeal to borough leaders to keep the building as a community center that might reopen as a school.

They received no promises. More than 30 residents crammed into a muster room in the Klehini Valley Fire Hall for the meeting after borough officials turned down a request to hold it in the mothballed school.

Manager David Sosa told the group there was no funding in the current year’s budget to open the building this winter, even for just a few nights per week.School superintendent Ginger Jewell said that without a minimum enrollment of 10 students that triggers additional state funding, the district couldn’t afford to operate the school.

Jewell also expressed apprehension about a close-reopen cycle that might occur if enrollment were to see-saw. “I wouldn’t want it opening and closing.”

Tuesday’s meeting resulted from a private meeting last week between Sosa and Mosquito Lake residents, who said the manager told them the building was no longer a school and that the borough would be looking to sell it. Highway residents Tuesday said Sosa’s statements were a revelation.

“We were told it wasn’t a school any more. That struck a chord with many of the women up here,” said Zach Jacobson. “I understand legacies come to an end, but do we need to chop it so quick? How did it transition so fast last year, from a school to a building for sale?”

Other residents argued that the facility was funded and built to serve as a “community school,” a special designation aimed at providing for community needs as well as daytime education. In a letter, former Mosquito Lake teacher Kathy Holmes listed more than a dozen other uses the building has served, including as a site for borough meetings and events like the Klehini Valley Fire Department’s annual dinner.

Longtime resident Deb Stanford noted that the location of Tuesday’s meeting wasn’t big enough to comfortably hold those in attendance Tuesday. “We are having a community meeting and we don’t have enough room for everyone to sit down. We need a bigger space, just to have a meeting.”

Sosa told residents that the borough was spending $30,000 a year to maintain the closed school and that opening it as a community center would likely cost $50,000 to $75,000. In rough terms, that would add $150 to the tax bill of every piece of property up the highway, he said. In a typical year, the building’s heating and electric bills total $35,000, he said. “It’s not an inexpensive property to operate.”

Sosa told the group that a successful plan for keeping the building would involve providing services of value to the community, affordably. He suggested creation of a service area to provide funding and perhaps providing other needs. A new plan would need to be presented to the borough for operating a building. Both ideas rankled residents.

“We’re at the grassroots here,” said Pat Warren. “These people have lived here 30 or 40 years. People in this room have grown up here and gone to (Mosquito Lake School) and want to raise their children here.”

Resident David Pahl characterized the drop in school attendance as temporary. “When the state built this school, they were investing in the future of this area. I’m asking the borough to do the same. This problem is of the moment. We need to look beyond the moment.”

Toward the meeting’s end, resident Joe Ordonez asked if the borough would be willing to pay for local consultants to draw up a strategic plan for the building, an expense he estimated at around $1,000. Sosa said such funding would have to come through the assembly.

Sosa said such a school plan would have to address questions like the nearby Klukwan School, and would have to compete with other funding requests to the borough. “It’s not just your plan. It’s why your plan is better than the other plans.”

George Campbell, a highway resident and the only assembly member at the meeting, said competition for borough funds would be tight this year. “If you want a community center… we’re looking how to fund the very basics” including sewer plant improvements and Lutak Dock repair. “There’s a very real fiscal element that needs to be included in this.”

In interviews before and after Tuesday’s meeting, Sosa said he was told by retiring school superintendent Michael Byer at a maintenance meeting in June that responsibility for the building was returning to the borough. Sosa said he’d received no specific assembly direction for what to do with the school, but that he had directed borough staff to assess its value for possible sale.

Sosa said a transition between managers and school superintendents may have obscured the change in status of the building from a school to surplus borough property. “There could have been more clarity. There wasn’t a clear (public) understanding of what all of this meant.”

He said he wouldn’t support keeping an empty building for long. “A building sitting there, not functioning, I have a challenge with that,” Sosa said. “I need a plan that I can take to the assembly that’s workable, but that still has to be balanced against the other needs of the borough.”

Aimee Jacobson, a Mosquito Lake parent with two children, said afterward that although the meeting was inspiring, it was discouraging that borough leaders seemed to judge the value of the school only in monetary terms. “The value of this school to our kids is so much more than a dollar sign. That’s why everybody showed up tonight. How do you put that on paper?” she asked.

Ciana Redman and Sara Marquardt grew up in the upper valley. They both showed up at the meeting with infants they hope to send to Mosquito Lake School. Marquardt said there are more people living in the upper valley now than when she was growing up. “There’s a million things we could do with this building if we’re not having a school right now that are better than leaving it vacant.”

If the school doesn’t open, she’d rather send her children to Klukwan School than all the way into town, she said.

School superintendent Jewell said the borough school board will revisit the status of Mosquito Lake School at its January meeting, as it pledged to do when it closed the school last spring.

Neighborhood advocates for the building, who distributed a survey at Tuesday’s meeting, scheduled the group’s next meeting for 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 17.