(The Center Square) – California drivers can expect the state’s gas tax to go up 2.2 cents on July 1, which will bring the total tax to 63.4 cents a gallon.
Category: Alaska News
(The Center Square) – Property tax reappraisals will have a one-year moratorium in North Carolina.
Pearl Creek Elementary School is seen on June 3, 2025. The Fairbanks North Star Borough School District decided to close the school at the end of the academic year. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
Alaska’s acting attorney general filed an emergency petition with the Alaska Supreme Court to compel the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District to open a charter school whose application the district previously denied.
The petition comes one day after a Fairbanks judge denied a preliminary injunction filed by the local charter group that sought to force the district to open Pearl Creek STEAM charter school.
“Without a speedy decision, the school will be unable to open this year,” wrote Acting Attorney General Cori Mills.
Mills urged the court to reverse the state judge’s decision and instruct the district to move forward in approving the charter school to open in the fall. “That means the District must take all necessary steps to ensure the Pearl Creek STEAM charter school opens in August 2026,” she wrote.
It’s the latest development in a months-long saga and court dispute between the Fairbanks district and the group behind Pearl Creek STEAM – a proposed charter school focused on science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics – that is seeking to open its doors to students from Kindergarten through sixth grade this fall.
Members of the Fairbanks school board unanimously denied the charter last year, citing a variety of problems with the proposal for the school and millions in costs to open a new school in the building of a school that was closed last year due to severe budget cuts.
The group behind Pearl Creek STEAM objected to the districts’ evaluation, saying it had a sound proposal and community support to open the school. The group appealed to the Alaska State Board of Education, which reviewed and granted the application in April, overruling the district. The district appealed the decision in state court, which was being heard in a separate case.
In the meantime, the group behind Pearl Creek STEAM filed a civil lawsuit with the state superior court and asked for a preliminary injunction to compel the district to sign the charter and work on opening the school.
The Pearl Creek charter group argued that the court should force the district to open the school because of the state approval, while the district argued the court should maintain the status quo by allowing the school to remain closed.
On Wednesday, a state judge agreed with the district and denied the preliminary injunction to compel the opening of the school, saying the Pearl Creek group does not face irreparable harm because no school exists yet.
“This is not a matter of no education as opposed to education,” Judge Kirk Schwalm wrote. “It is a matter of less preferred education to preferred education.”
The judge also wrote that opening the school would cost an estimated $2 million, which “would impair FNSBD’s ability to maintain an orderly opening of existing schools for the 2026-2027 school year including impacts to existing schools’ capacity, classroom size, and staffing.”
The two cases — the district appeal of the state board decision, and the charter group’s lawsuit — were combined in court and are being heard by Schwalm. A decision in the district’s appeal case is expected in October.
Officials with the attorney general’s office and Alaska Department of Law did not respond to emailed questions on Thursday about the reason for requesting the Alaska Supreme Court review and overturn the state court’s decision, or why the state chose to get involved on behalf of the charter group.
The attorney general also asked the court for an expedited timeline for a response from the district by 10 a.m. on Friday. That issue is pending before the court.
Fairbanks school district plans to take the state to court over charter school dispute
Bobby Burgess, president of the Fairbanks North Star Borough School Board, said Thursday that the district respects the rule of law and will continue in the legal process to appeal and oppose the state board’s decision granting the charter. He called the attorney general’s move “frustrating.”
He said the district is concerned not only with the budget and expense of reopening the school but it also remains concerned with the charter group’s proposal.
“I don’t think it’s possible to open the school in August at this point. I don’t really think it was possible to open it successfully even on April 30,” he said, referring to when the state board approved the school.
“I think the logistical complications between the hiring process that we need to follow, the contracts with our labor unions and the budget adjustments, frankly, all of that would have been, you know, maybe not impossible to do, but next to impossible,” he said. “It would have been a huge challenge to make any of that work without disrupting the lives of our staff and students.”
But the group behind Pearl Creek STEAM sees it differently. Jennifer Redmond, a parent and treasurer of the Pearl Creek STEAM group said the state has approved the charter and the group has a plan to successfully open the school.
“The question now is not whether Pearl Creek exists, the question is whether it will be treated the same as other approved public charter schools,” she said.
“We aren’t asking for special treatment,” she added. “We’re asking for equal treatment under the law, and for the district to fulfill the same obligations it has fulfilled for every other public charter school it operates.”
Redmond said she’s concerned the district’s continued opposition erodes public trust. She said she thinks the district has a budget for opening the school. She said the school has over 379 applicants interested in attending, plans for hiring teachers and staff, and a proposal coming before the Fairbanks borough assembly to lease the school building.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll be prepared to operate in August with just a little bit of cooperation from the district,” she said.
State education commissioner threatens to withhold funding over charter dispute
The ruling comes a week after the state Commissioner of Education Deena Bishop penned a letter threatening to withhold state funding from the Fairbanks district if they did not move forward with opening the charter school.
“Alaska law mandates in the clearest possible terms that after the State Board’s approval, the local school board ‘shall operate the charter school,’” Bishop wrote.
Bishop said under the law, state funds may not be paid to districts that fail to comply with state laws or regulations. She argued the district filing an appeal of the state board’s decision does not stop their legal responsibility to open the school.
“Failure to do so will put the state’s funding at risk,” Bishop wrote. “Time is of the essence.”
Officials with Bishop’s office and the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development did not respond to emailed questions about the reasoning behind the letter over the past week.
The Fairbanks district responded to Bishop in a letter on Thursday that rejected the commissioner’s legal arguments and defended its due process rights to appeal.
“We are pursuing a judicial review of a state approval process, because we believe that process was flawed. We’re going through the appropriate legal steps here. We are not flouting the law,” said Burgess, the district’s board president.
In an interview on Thursday, Burgess said it seemed “completely unconscionable for the state to threaten to withhold funding from an entire school district and potentially prevent 11,000 students in our case from receiving an education next year because of a small group of people who want to basically reopen a school that was closed for, for you know, important reasons.”
Redmond, with the Pearl Creek STEAM group, said the threat to withhold state funding does not change the group’s position advocating for the school. She said it’s the responsibility of elected officials and the district to follow the law.
Burgess called the state’s involvement with the charter approval and the education commissioner’s threat an overreach of local control.
“This is an egregious case of overreach, and it becomes more egregious with every threatening letter that the commissioner signs,” Burgess said.
“If the state can just force us to operate a school with a price tag of $2 million on it, what are we here for? What is the school board’s function if we can’t even control our own budget and make decisions in the interest of our own communities?”
One caribou in the Teshekpuk herd approaches another on June 27, 2014. The herd, which spends the entire year on the North Slope, uses land adjacent to Teshekpuk Lake. (Photo by Bob Wick/U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
The federal government is continuing to push for oil drilling in a North Slope conservation area intended to protect caribou.
Last month, the U.S. Department of the Interior asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to review a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason that blocked oil and gas lease sales in part of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska near Teshekpuk Lake.
Gleason’s ruling came a day before a scheduled lease sale in the reserve, and some parcels affected by her decision did go out to bid.
More than 1 million acres near the lake had been protected under a conservation agreement with a Native coalition known as Nuiqsut Trilateral. The Trump administration canceled the agreement in December, ahead of an oil lease sale in March.
Parties to the agreement sued, saying the cancellation was illegal, and Gleason preliminarily ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, placing the area off limits to oil and gas leasing while the case goes forward.
If successful, the Interior Department appeal would allow leasing to go forward, at least temporarily, while the broader case is argued in court.
Written arguments have repeatedly been delayed, and the federal government’s opening arguments are now due by July 6, with the last briefs expected in August.
Meanwhile, written arguments in the underlying case are scheduled to be finished by the end of June, with possible oral courtroom arguments to follow at a later date.
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Mary McLeod Bethune, the daughter of former slaves, with a line of girls from the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls that she founded. Daytona Beach, Florida, 1905. (Photo retrieved from the Library of Congress)
The abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass is known for many things, but perhaps among the most significant is his views on education’s relationship to slavery. Douglass himself was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818.
Douglass described in his 1845 autobiography how one of his enslavers, Mrs. Auld, began teaching him to read when he was a child. Mrs. Auld’s husband ordered her to stop giving Douglass lessons.
“Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Douglass writes. “To use his own words, further, he said, ‘If you give a n— an inch, he will take an ell. A n— should know nothing but to obey his master.’”
Congress enacted the 13th Amendment on Jan. 31, 1865, abolishing slavery. It was not until June 19, 1865, that word of the amendment reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, marking the origin of the Juneteenth holiday.
The Biden administration declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. Today, Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. But the story for formerly enslaved people continued to unfold in complex ways well after Juneteenth, including when it came to their educational journeys.
Juneteenth made clear that freedom was not just confined to someone’s physical enslavement, but mental enslavement as well, bound in the laws that barred enslaved people from receiving an education in Southern states.
Making learning illegal
In 1739, the Stono slave rebellion took place in South Carolina. Fearing that educated slaves would go on to plot future rebellions, South Carolina passed an anti-literacy law in 1740, banning slaves from being taught how to read.
Most Southern states soon followed with anti-literacy laws of their own between 1740 and 1834, in the hopes of preventing any further slave rebellions. These laws applied to both enslaved and free Black people.
Despite these laws, thousands of enslaved people still learned to read and write in the antebellum South. Literacy was a means of freedom.
Meanwhile, the first African Free School for Black children was established in New York City in 1787. The one-room schoolhouse began with 40 students, the majority of whom had parents who were formerly enslaved. Six additional, similar schools were created with public funding by 1824.
Juneteenth and the path to freedom
Juneteenth is a complicated story of formerly enslaved people’s faith and resilience, as well as white supremacists’ hate and resistance to formerly enslaved people experiencing liberation.
It also offers an important reminder that true freedom must also include the right to an education.
Formerly enslaved individuals had various responses to their newfound freedom in 1865, ranging from gratitude and joy to despair and loss.
Many formerly enslaved people decided to leave plantations and Southern states to reunite with family members and communities separated by slavery.
Others opted to remain where they had been enslaved, seeking to experience freedom in familiar surroundings. In fact, the vast majority of freed people remained in the South.
Regardless of their choices, the approximately 4 million formerly enslaved people challenged the U.S. to acknowledge their liberation and welcome them as equals.
Relentlessly, they endeavored to establish themselves as free citizens within the nation. One of these newly freed people’s primary goals was to receive an education.
Learning to read, write and more
After the Civil War, newly freed people gathered in churches, homes, cellars, sheds, meetinghouses and even under shade trees in the fields where they worked the crops to learn how to read and write. They also learned basic job skills, such as the ability to read and understand labor contracts.
Many of the teachers had no formal training, and some of them were local Black people who were self-taught.
Other educators included white teachers from the South and the North, sent by churches and aid societies.
White aid societies and religious organizations from the North, including the American Missionary Association and the National Freedman’s Relief Association, sometimes funded these free schools for formerly enslaved Black people.
However, most of the money to fund these schools came from the newly freed Americans, who privately paid for their schools.
While about 90% of the Black population in Southern states were illiterate in 1865, this percentage dropped to 70% by 1880.
A journey into higher education
Newly freed Black people also began to have more options for higher education.
The first historically Black college and university, Cheyney University, was established in Pennsylvania in 1837, well before the Civil War. A total of four HBCUs were established by the end of the Civil War in 1865.
At this point, true liberation began, as a growing number of HBCUs offered academic freedom to Black Americans, who otherwise would have been prohibited from attending most colleges and universities.
In the 15 years following the Civil War, a total of 59 HBCUs had opened their doors to Black students.
In 1867, by act of Congress, Howard University was established in Washington, D.C. It provided not only basic college courses but also programs in law, medicine, education and pharmaceuticals.
A promise that requires education
A whole new set of challenges and opportunities greeted the formerly enslaved Black Americans who sought freedom in the North. Most arrived in cities such as Chicago and New York, where they found some humanitarian support but also racial discrimination and poverty.
Their lives were constantly filled with both legal and racial hostility.
Education ranked high among the free people as a priority, as they looked to gain new skills and advance in life. They learned not only the basics in reading and math, but also job skills, citizenship and advanced learning in professional careers, such as law, medicine, pharmacy and teaching.
Ultimately, Juneteenth offered a promise of freedom – but education was necessary to make it happen.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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A glider is deployed in the Gulf of Alaska as part of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative program. Gliders are autonomous underwater vehicles that can gather data for weeks or months. The glider was deployed as part of Global Station Papa Array, a collection of instruments positioned in the Gulf of Alaska through the Ocean Observatories Initiative. (Photo provided by the Station Papa Science Team)
Hundreds of sophisticated monitoring instruments will remain in place in the nation’s oceans, thanks to a National Science Foundation reversal of its plan to partially dismantle the system.
The federal agency announced on Thursday that it is dropping its plan to remove hundreds of instruments from the Ocean Observatories Initiative program.
The program encompasses more than 900 instruments monitoring ocean currents, temperatures, sea life and other conditions. Information gathered is used to analyze weather and prepare for extreme weather events, manage fisheries, record climate change and other functions. The $386 million system was installed a decade ago and was intended to last for three decades.
News that the Trump administration planned to pull out hundreds of the instruments – including those positioned in Alaska’s ocean waters – triggered outrage from scientists, the fishing industry, members of Congress from coastal states and others.
Alaska’s Murkowski among Congress members seeking to save ocean science network
Late Wednesday, the U.S. Senate approved a bill to prohibit federal spending for decommissioning of any of the Ocean Observatories Initiative without a thorough review, including review by people and organizations using the information provided by the system
The bill was introduced and brought to the floor by Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Jeff Merkley. Called the “Saving the OOI Act,” it passed by unanimous consent.
The following day, the National Science Foundation announced the reversal of a decision that it previously classified as a mere “descoping” of the observatories network.
“The U.S. National Science Foundation appreciates the concerns raised by the range of stakeholders that have informed us they rely on data from the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI),” said a statement released by the agency. “Effective immediately, NSF will not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays and will continue operations including planned maintenance.”
The National Science Foundation said it had already removed part of the system, called the Endurance Array, which is a number of instruments that were placed along the coasts of Oregon and Washington. But now, the agency said, “we are developing plans to redeploy the equipment after servicing.”
Murkowski, one of the prominent defenders of the Oceans Observatories Initiative, emphasized the importance of the system to Alaska, which has more coastline than the rest of the states combined, a fisheries industry worth billions of dollars annually and coastal communities vulnerable to extreme storms.
In a statement, she and Merkley said they welcomed the new decision to keep the Ocean Observatories Initiative intact.
“The National Science Foundation’s decision to leave the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s buoys in place is a massive win for coastal communities and fishermen around the country,” Murkowski said. “The data accessed through OOI is important for so many, and I’m immensely grateful that NSF listened to our calls. Today we saw the federal process at work—with the Senate quickly passing legislation and the executive branch responding to our position. I’m pleased to have partnered with Senator Merkley and a number of my colleagues to preserve this valuable system.”
Merkley said the OOI’s work is vital that he and Murkowski would continue to be champions of the initiative: “We’ll keep fighting to ensure scientists, fishermen, and coastal communities can continue to utilize the critical data the OOI provides.”
While most of the sponsors of the bill were Democrats from coastal states, a second Republican had signed on as of Wednesday as a cosponsor: Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska.
Support from senators of both parties was important, said a statement released by the environmental group Oceana.
“We commend the bipartisan group of lawmakers who acted quickly to oppose the dismantling of this critical tool for monitoring the health of our oceans,” Oceana Senior Campaign Director Gib Brogan said in the statement. “Strong ocean science benefits everyone, and this reversal will ensure this tool continues to provide benefits for all of us for years to come.”
The Alaska State Capitol is seen on May 18, 2026. (Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon)
If Alaska lawmakers do not vote by 11:59 p.m. Friday on a bill offering a tax break to the proposed trans-Alaska natural gas pipeline project, Gov. Mike Dunleavy says he will call them into another 30-day special session.
In a message on social media, Dunleavy said legislators are making progress on the issue, but if they cannot finish work by the end of an ongoing special session, “I will issue a call for a second special session to give them more time to quickly complete the work.”
For several days, the Senate majority has been deadlocked on a variety of issues, keeping the bill from advancing to the full Senate.
The governor and leading members of the Senate have met several times in closed-door meetings, frequently gathering in the governor’s cabinet room on the third floor of the capitol even as tour groups walk the halls outside the room.
Late Thursday afternoon, after the Senate Finance Committee canceled scheduled meetings for a second consecutive day, Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, said the committee will release a revised version of the tax-break bill about 9 a.m. Friday morning.
After meeting in a joint session with the House at 10 a.m. Friday to consider possible veto overrides, the full Senate will consider the tax-break bill, Stevens said.
He declined to say what changes, if any, the Senate Finance Committee will make to the bill before it reaches the full Senate.
Last week, the Alaska House voted 34-5 to replace the state’s 2% petroleum property tax with a smaller tax on gas shipped through the pipeline.
Under current law, the pipeline would generate $47 billion for the state and boroughs along the route through 2062, according to figures from the Alaska Department of Revenue.
The House-passed bill would drop the expected revenue to about $31 billion. The state would still collect production taxes, royalties and other fees.
Glenfarne, the pipeline project’s lead developer, has said that replacing the property tax is necessary for it to obtain financing to build the project.
Dunleavy introduced an early version of the tax-break bill in March, and when it failed to pass the Legislature by the end of lawmakers’ regular session on May 20, he called a 30-day special session on the issue.
“My hope is we can get the work done and a bill passed that works to help move this large gas line project forward before midnight Friday,” the governor said in his statement. “If not, we will begin the process again Saturday with another special session.”
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A legal review is raising doubts about the Alaska Division of Elections’ decision to remove Dan J. Sullivan from the U.S. Senate ballot. Lawmakers say the Constitution only sets age, citizenship, and residency requirements for Senate candidates, while critics argue…
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