Facing a budget deficit and a wave of other planned reductions, the district is proposing a reshuffle of elementary education that would also bring the end of the IGNITE program for gifted students and require dozens of teachers to reapply for jobs.
Chelsea Ambrose, an art teacher at Kincaid and Gladys Wood elementary schools, expressed skepticism that art education can be meaningfully incorporated into other classroom work if the Anchorage School District discontinues dedicated art classes. Photographed on February 15, 2024.
The school board is set to vote on the plan as part of its overall budget at its meeting Tuesday, Feb. 27. The board was originally set to vote on Feb. 20 but school officials said Friday the vote was delayed to allow for more time for public comment.The changes to elementary education are expected to save the district about $2.2 million. However, they’re drawing criticism from educators who expressed skepticism that art and health can be meaningfully incorporated into more general coursework.
Students “would be tackling real-world problems” by “using science, design theories, or scientific theories from the engineering and from the science pieces to solve hands-on, real-life problems,” Viste said in an interview. He said no curriculum had been developed yet for the new program. program for high-performing elementary students. The district has proposed cutting it to save money in previous years as well, each timeWhile IGNITE was only for higher-performing students who tested into the program, all students would participate in STEAM.In interviews, some teachers described the value of having art and health taught as their own subjects.
“For students, if they didn’t have health, I think that they would lose a lot,” said Hartman. “Everything we teach them is literally how to take care of the bodies they have,” she said.“I am really fearful that it’s going to be something like studying salmon, and you do some science with the salmon, and then the art component is sketching the anatomy of a salmon. Which isn’t art,” she said. “Can it be beautiful? Yeah. Does it involve some fine motor skills? Absolutely.
For Hartman, the health teacher, the loss of dedicated health instruction would mean fewer opportunities for the kind of vulnerable and important conversations that can happen in a health class taught by instructors with hours of specialized training.“Every year I’ve had kiddos report things to me after these lessons. And every year, I’ve had to call ,” she said.
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