Construction will be happening all summer long at the Petersburg School District. Two major projects are underway to increase safety at the schools, inside and out.
The first project is a complete remodel of the high school office. The office has been entirely gutted, and will be rebuilt for visibility and safety.
“The office area was such that the folks working in the office really didn’t have a good, clear view of who was coming to the door,” said Superintendent Robyn Taylor.
In 2023, threats made against the school sparked conversations on how to make the district safer.
After the office is finished, the district will complete future security and access renovations as money allows.
The other major project is outside, where construction crews are replacing the roof on the middle and high school building. Heavy snow damaged the roof in 2022, and caused major leaks.
Sitka-based CBC Construction is in charge of both projects. Chris Balovitch is the president and owner of the company, and said that having a good roof is important.
“Everything rolls downhill,” he said. “So if your roof is bad, it’s going to destroy everything inside the building.”
Petersburg received over 18 inches of rain in May, which broke its monthly record. Balovitch said that after the rainy weather diminished, construction crews were able to start work for the summer.
The state of Alaska paid $2.7 million dollars toward the roof repairs, which covers just over half of the total cost. The rest of the construction, including the office remodel, is covered by a $3.5 million dollar bond that Petersburg voters approved last fall.
There could be more school construction projects on the horizon, but Taylor said the district needs to complete a condition survey first, when engineers evaluate school grounds and look for any issues.
The last time the district did that kind of survey was in 2008. Taylor said some of the safety concerns noted back then still exist today.
“[At] the entry to the middle school, the cement on these stairs is chipping away and chipping away,” she said as an example. “It can create an unsafe aspect for people coming in.”
The district is currently starting the work to complete a new survey. When it’s completed, it’ll highlight what needs to be fixed next. The survey will also give the district an advantage when they ask the state for future funding.
Every year, school districts submit maintenance and construction projects to the Department of Education and Early Development (DEED). The state then prioritizes and ranks projects using a formula. Compared to other schools who submitted maintenance requests, the Petersburg School District ranked No. 12 for roof repair, and No. 47 for security and access renovations. The state funded the top 26 projects for the 2025 fiscal year, meaning that the district’s security and access renovations ranked too low to receive state funding.
Taylor said that some schools have had important projects on the list for much longer than Petersburg, but with lower rankings. KYUK and ProPublica previously reported that many rural Alaska schools have been on the list for years while critical requests for state funding have been ignored.
She said having the means to complete the survey can put a district higher on the list.
“There’s a lot of districts that have greater needs than what we do, but haven’t had quite the infrastructure that we’ve been able to sustain to get projects put on the list,” said Taylor. “So we tend to be in a little bit better position than other districts across the state for getting the support we need, just because this district has been so strong in its maintenance of effort.”
Petersburg’s middle and high schools will be closed all summer for construction. The district expects most of the work to be completed before school starts in September, but some repairs on the roof will continue into the fall.
