Thursday is the first day of school for Juneau students in first through twelfth grade. It’s also Shawn Arnold’s first day as superintendent while school is in session. He officially started the job on July 1.
Arnold is not new to the district though; he joined in 2021. KTOO’s Mike Lane recently spoke with Arnold, who’s also been superintendent in Valdez and Nome.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to move to Juneau?
Shawn Arnold: Well, I was looking at taking a break from being a superintendent at the time, and I came down as a director of student services, and then I moved into a principal role between Thunder Mountain High School and then Thunder Mountain Middle School.
What attracted you to want to lead the whole school district?
Shawn Arnold: Well, a lot of different reasons. I still have a few years left in my education career. I had worked in the role up north in a couple of different districts as a superintendent, and for over the past decade, I had taught at the UAS superintendent endorsement program. So I’ve kind of led, mentored, developed a lot of the superintendents in the district, and I felt like, after a little bit of a break, just with the direction that I could be, you know, of purpose for the community, and just wanted to step back into that role.
What do you see as the district’s biggest challenges right now?
Shawn Arnold: There definitely are three big challenges we’re facing. You know, the first one is kind of the budget, finance. This coming school year, it looks really good as far as our budget, but every year it’s kind of fluctuating, and we want to make sure we respond to you know those those challenges year to year. The second big challenge is our retention and recruitment of educators. You know we have great educators in all of our classrooms, all of our buildings, support staff, principals, and it’s getting tougher and tougher to to kind of find those folks. The third challenge, of course, is something we’re all probably seeing around the community is declining enrollment and how we respond to that. But it’s just a fact of life that fewer people are having kids, and the number of kids have slowly kind of dropped. The district had to react and make some tough choices or decisions in the past few years, but how that looks in the future, it’s really you know we don’t know. But all three challenges, you know, budget, recruitment, and declining enrollment – that’s something a lot of districts in Alaska are facing, probably in the nation.
Since you mentioned it, how do you plan to recruit and retain educators in the district?
Shawn Arnold: Well, now more than ever, we have to get creative with some solutions. One piece, of course, is just marketing. We know living here in Juneau, there’s a quality of life that we have. It’s one of the best communities in the state of Alaska – it’s one of the best places to live. But you know, trying to attract and get kind of Juneau on the on the map, so to speak, for folks when they’re looking for jobs, when they’re looking for teaching jobs that they want to come here. Part of that it’s it’s a little bit of a complicated by the challenge of affordable housing, so we have to be realistic on that. We know there’s a lot of amazing people right here in our backyard, and so developing some pipelines between multiple university programs for folks that want to stay here in the community and become teachers. We have an amazing HR director – Sybil Vanderhoff – who has already put some programs in place to develop future principals, future teachers, and we want to continue like growing our own, which is one of the one of the biggest solutions we’re looking at.
How do you plan to lead the district effectively, given the financial instability of our public education system?
Shawn Arnold: That’s a great question. You know, finances-it’s one of the toughest things to operate. You know, a school. You have to pay pay staff. You have to pay for the lights that are overhead. And you know the funds that we use, it’s taxpayer money – it’s public funds. We have to be responsible with them. One thing too is like the hope is to kind of build a little bit of a reserve, kind of a buffer. It’s like a almost like a rainy day fund when problems come up there after this school year, if there’s any kind of situations that we incur, but build that up. But also, you know, be transparent, collaborate with the community about where we’re at as a financial, if it ever comes to like making tough decisions,
How can the district help students feel safe?
Shawn Arnold: That’s a great question. And safety and security for me, I go back to you know my my building principal days as when students come to school, they need to feel safe and secure in order to learn. The same for our staff. If the staff aren’t feeling safe and secure, then they’re not going to be effective teachers, and so that’s one of the most important things. Part of it is just continuing a lot of the preventative, proactive measures that we have. And that doesn’t look like the traditional physical measures. It can be counseling. It can be making sure that you know students either that they don’t feel bullied, that we address like bullying appropriately, so students feel safe inside their classrooms, and so it’s a really kind of a wraparound approach. But being proactive, keeping parents informed about any concerns as well is a really important thing.
