Budget dominates discussions of school safety, building maintenance at Nome Public Schools

School safety was the main focus at two events last week – a tour of Nome Public Schools attended by the Nome Common Council and school board members, and a town hall meeting hosted by the Nome School District.
At the tour of Nome Public Schools, members of the city council and school board toured the campuses of Nome Elementary School, Nome-Beltz and Anvil City Science Academy and looked at maintenance issues. And on a town hall on Thursday, parents had the opportunity to bring up safety concerns and learn about the district’s safety protocols, spurred by a recent incident.
At Nome-Beltz Middle High School, the front and center issue is the building’s main entrance. The front doors do not have a buzzer system – anyone can walk in, instead of having to be let in by the front office. The middle school can be entered without passing by the front office.
“There’s no real physical barrier from anybody just coming in and being in the building, and nobody would even know that they are here,” Superintendent Jamie Burgess told members of the city council touring Nome Public Schools.
The City of Nome had put out a request for proposals on a project that would install safety doors on campus, but when bids came back in, they were much higher than expected and the project was tabled. The issue came up again in January after a student at Nome-Beltz brought an unloaded firearm to campus. The student was arrested and no one was harmed in the incident, but it again brought the safety doors to the forefront of discussions.
During the January 13 school board meeting public comments sessions, numerous parents brought up the safety doors, expressing their frustration that the project had not yet been completed.
At the tour of Nome Public Schools, Nome Common Council Member Scot Henderson asked about the safety door project. “The city has already, for the last several years, committed to funding at least 50 percent or maybe more, depending on what the final RFPs come back at,” said Henderson.
Burgess said that her understanding was that the city had agreed to fund the project, and the school district didn’t budget the cost of safety doors. The district already has several large, pressing maintenance projects. “We don’t have even have the money for those,” said Burgess.  
Burgess said that she has asked City Manager Lee Smith for a $3.5 million appropriation to Nome Public Schools for next year’s budget. “If you guys are going to give us less than that, I have to cut teachers,” she said.
Burgess went on to say that the uncertainty surrounding how much the City of Nome is willing to give the district affects teacher contracts. “We’re going to have to postpone offering non-tenured teacher contracts,” she said.
On the agenda for February 10 school board meeting, only tenured teacher contracts are listed for renewal.
There are other safety concerns at the NPS buildings. In many of the double-paned windows around the elementary school, the inner seal has broken. The windows themselves are often too small to get out of, which Superintendent Jamie Burgess said is a safety issue.
“If we had to evacuate through windows, in many of the situations, our windows are so tiny, we might be able to get some of our smaller kids if we kind of stuff them through on a ladder,” she said. “Ideally, what we’d like to do is replace them with windows that are having larger openings.”
Nome Elementary School Principal Michelle Carton said that some of the doors in the building only lock from the outside. “Some teachers had to come out with their key to lock it so that they can shut it and then it’s locked,” she said. “So that’s not always the best when we’re trying to quickly hide and move to a place.”
The loudspeakers in some classrooms don’t work, so the announcements come through the classroom’s telephone. Carton said that announcements from the telephone are easier to mishear. “It’s hard in an emergency situation,” she said.
Every teacher has a radio which they keep on and tuned to the same building-wide channel, which enables them to communicate. At the town hall on Tuesday, Nome-Beltz Middle High School Principal Teriscovkya Smith said that the radios are also the way staff would communicate about a dangerous intruder in the building. “The likelihood that you’re going to hear about a violent intruder on a PA system is low and that’s just the reality,” she said.
 Parents at the town hall pressed Smith, Burgess, and other administrative members on the response to the January 6 incident. Some were unhappy with the district’s initial response. Others wanted to know what kind of ALICE training had been conducted this year. ALICE, an acronym for Alert, Lock-down, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, refers to a safety protocol the district uses in the event of a violent intruder.
One parent asked how many intruder drills are conducted each school year, and if any had been conducted during this school year.
Smith said that the Nome-Beltz campus had not conducted ALICE drills this year with students. “I felt certain pieces were missing and I didn’t want to roll something out until I had answers to what I considered to be really important safety protocol,” she said.
She said that at an assembly following the January 6 incident, students had watched the ALICE training video. Students have not practiced the protocol this year but have done so in past years.
Smith added that she would like to see the ALICE protocol practiced once a semester.
Rachel Ventress asked about ALICE protocol. “Is it something that should be viewed as a tool that’s in the school’s toolbox?”
Smith said that ALICE is what the school follows. She said the plan for next is to practice it at least twice a year.
A community member watching the livestream of the event asked if there were any plans to hire a school safety officer with Nome Police Department. Burgess said that there are some families in the district that don’t want a constant police presence on campus. The other issue is the cost of hiring the officer. The district could potentially fund a position with grants, but those typically only last three to five years.
“Our school board is the one that ultimately would make the decision,” said Burgess. “So their job is to listen to the constituents, so if that conversation comes up, they can talk about that.”
The discussion of budget surrounding school improvements went beyond safety doors. The Nome Elementary School is affected by frost heaves in the ground. The ramps leading into the school are steep, and the ramp at the front entrance is tilted towards one side. The playground equipment at the elementary school is no longer level. The elementary school closed for two days last month due to sewer repairs.
Some of the Nome-Beltz campus exterior doors have air gaps that let in cold air and contribute to high heating costs.
When there is work done at the middle high school, Burgess said they must be careful of asbestos. “Anytime we do work, we try to see if there’s a way that we can get rid of some,” she said.
During the tour, council and school board members took the opportunity to meet with the high school student council, where they heard that visiting teams to Nome-Beltz hate showering in the locker rooms. A further inspection of the facilities in question showed that the water took a while to heat up and the lights inside the showers would not turn on.
Some of the classrooms at Nome-Beltz have water damage, with ceiling tiles discolored or removed. Work was done to fix the roof this past year, but there are still leaks. A third-party report in 2025 found that the district and the contractor working on the roof were both partially responsible for some aspects that led to the leak.
The tour of district buildings also included the teacher dormitories. The district has two sets of teacher housing – dormitories and apartments, but the district isn’t always able to guarantee housing for new hires. “We’ve had some people that have literally told us that they would love to come here, but unless we can guarantee that they have a place to live, that they’re going to move on to something else,” said Burgess.
Henderson asked if the district had ever considered modular housing for teachers, which he said could be a cheaper upfront cost than building a whole new apartment building.
Burgess said that the district had, but that building housing exclusively out at the Middle-High School campus, miles out of town, presents a new set of problems. “One of our challenges is, to a certain extent, is that we want our teachers to integrate into the community,” she said.
City Council Member Adam Lust asked if it really makes sense to subsidize the housing costs. “Would it not make more sense to just pay the teachers and all [these] paraprofessionals and the education support professionals what they’re worth, and then just charge them the actual market rate for things?” he asked.
School Board Member Darlene Trigg said that a shift would be difficult. “It does take a lot to actually make changes when you’re thinking through some of those kinds of fundamental shifts, no matter what, you can upset somebody,” she said.
The school board members and city council members discussed a joint work session to discuss the district’s budget. They have not set a date for that session.