the valley just lost three schools

and a twenty-eight million dollar shortfall is the reason.

The Mat-Su school district closed three schools this year, Meadow Lakes and Larson over in Wasilla, and Glacier View out in Sutton. Together that moves around four hundred and fifteen students and dozens of staff to other schools.

So how did it get here? The district is the second biggest in the state, with almost twenty thousand kids, but the number of full-time students keeps dropping as more families switch to homeschool and correspondence programs. Fewer full-time students means less funding coming in.

On top of that, health insurance costs jumped by double digits, adding about six million dollars to the gap and pushing it to twenty-eight million.

The superintendent says closing these three buildings still wasn't enough to cover the hole, so deeper cuts were on the table too. The board looked at everything from dropping sports to a four-day school week before landing here.

If your kids walked into Meadow Lakes, Larson, or Glacier View, this is the fall everything shifts. He put it bluntly, calling it a no-win situation and saying they did this to save teaching jobs.