Scaled-back Academies of Anchorage will launch next year amid funding and other concerns, ASD says

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - The Anchorage School District has revamped its Academies of Anchorage (AOA) program for high school students this fall to include fewer career paths for students to choose from and a new curriculum for its Freshman Academy.

While students will be encouraged to take career-focused electives, AOA Director Sean Prince said students will no longer need to declare a particular career pathway as envisioned in the original Academies of Anchorage Master Plan.

Prince said funding concerns were a big part of scaling back the program. The district received a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education specifically to launch the AOA program, but Prince said funding uncertainty from the state was also a factor.

“We are unable to go to a wall-to-wall Academy this coming school year so we’ve had to make some adjustments and really look at what the state funding is and look at what we can do with teacher shortages and basically the whole landscape of the district,” Prince said. “And we’ve made some changes so we can keep moving towards those wall-to-wall academies, but we’re just taking it a little slower so we can go further.”

The first Freshman Academy for ninth-graders to explore career options began in the fall of 2024.

Full implementation of the program — which included a range of career pathways for sophomores to choose from for the next four years, or opt out — was supposed to begin in the 2025-26 school year, but it will now be a scaled-down version.

Prince said next year, Anchorage high schools will have at least two career/technical classes, with more classes added if future funding allows.

In a letter to parents, the district said the mandatory Freshmen Academy will continue next school year, although it will be reimagined as College and Career Exploration and Personal Finance course. The letter says the course will count as an Alaskan social studies credit and that students who took the first year of Freshman Academy without the updated curriculum will have that social studies requirement waived.

The letter also addresses a proposed schedule change. Originally, the district said it needed to change high school schedules from the current six periods to seven or eight to implement the Academies plan, but the idea received pushback from some parents who were concerned about the resulting shorter class periods.

The district now says there will be no change in the high school bell schedule for at least three to five years.

The district is also pursuing an updated AOA Master Plan. It says a draft plan is expected this fall that will include “family engagement efforts, especially from communities who felt underrepresented in the original version.”

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