Voters will be asked this fall whether Juneau’s School Board President Deedie Sorenson and Vice President Emil Mackey should stay in their seats on the board or get ousted from them.
On Thursday, Juneau’s clerk’s office announced that a local effort to recall the pair had gathered enough signatures to get the two questions onto the Oct. 1 ballot — nearly 2,400 signatures each.
Charles VanKirk, one of the leaders of the recall effort, called it an important step toward accountability.
“We want to hold our elected officials responsible and have them be accountable, so hopefully, there will be answers given rather than the public just being ignored,” he said.
The group argues that both Sorensen and Mackey failed to do their duty as board members when the district faced a multimillion dollar deficit earlier this year.
This spring, the school board voted to address that deficit by closing some schools, consolidating grades and reducing staff.
But VanKirk said those decisions weren’t in the best interest of the students or staff and weren’t what the public wanted.
“We feel hopeful that the recall will be successful, and that the opportunity exists for different people to be on the school board,” he said.
Sorensen and Mackey are both set to serve their terms through 2025, and they are the only board members eligible to be recalled from the board.
In response to the certification, Mackey said he’s deeply concerned about what message this will give to people who want to run for a seat on the board in this and future elections. He said the effort has been riddled with misinformation from the start.
“The damage that this is doing by just misinforming people on its face is extremely counterproductive to the welfare of the school district,” he said.
He said he thinks the root issue behind the recall effort is the board’s decision to close Thunder Mountain High School. He argues it has little to do with him and Sorensen as individual board members.
“In my opinion, every person that signed that affidavit either was ignorant or willfully misleading the public as to the facts of what led to the budgetary decisions,” he said. “They use the budget as an excuse to get it on the ballot. But it’s always been about Thunder Mountain.”
Sorensen said that, as a former teacher in Juneau, every board decision she makes is what she believes is best for student’s education. She said she stands by her budget decision, but thinks the recall effort is hardly about that.
“I think that people are angry. A certain group of people are extremely angry about the closure of one of the high schools,” she said. “And with the recall, I think that there’s some attempt to assign blame.”
She and Mackey said they will continue to advocate for themselves as board members and the decisions they made.
The next step is for the city clerk to transmit the certified petitions to the Assembly at its next meeting. There, the Assembly will need to pass a motion to include the questions on the ballot.
