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Alaska: Close Call: Parents and local school districts empowered - Representative Wes Keller (R-Wasilla) today thanked Governor Bill Walker for giving greater control to parents and local school districts over education delivered to their children.

Keller’s House Bill 156 became law today without the Governor’s signature, but also without the Governor’s veto. HB 156 tells Washington, D.C. that Alaska has no intention of being a U.S. Department of Education experiment. Parents, not bureaucrats have the right to control the content and standards of education for their children. Under HB 156, when there is a conflict between education laws (federal or state) and parental educational choice, parents ultimately must always have the right to determine how to educate their children.

Governor Walker said, “This was a very close call for me. I received a lot of input on this legislation -- from both sides. Given that this bill will have a broad and wide-ranging effect on education statewide, I have decided to allow HB 156 to become law without my signature.”

“HB 156 sends the message that Alaskans are not here to be a ‘rubber-stamp’ of Federal education policy,” Keller, R-Wasilla, said. “It also makes strides to ensure that Alaskans define student assessment, privacy, school designators, teacher evaluation, special education, curricula selection, and education standards.”

The law creates a moratorium on statewide standards based assessments and provides the Department of Education an exemption from the procurement code to ease the burden of acquiring a new assessment tool by 2020. - More...
Thursday PM - July 28, 2016

Alaska: Palmer Correctional Facility Closing; Closing Flawed Says Alaska Correctional Officers Association - Answering the call to reduce the budget while still providing best transitional services for prisoners, the Alaska Department of Corrections announced Tuesday it is closing and repurposing the Palmer Correctional Center. Commissioner Dean Williams says “this plan will increase staffing and safety at other facilities.”

Commissioner Williams said, “the plan to repurpose Palmer Correctional Center will bolster operations throughout the institutions by increasing safety while also lowering costs.”

The Commissioner also indicated in the press that he had been in “regular dialogue about these scenarios” with the Alaska Correctional Officers Association (ACOA). However, according to the ACOA, this is inaccurate. The Alaska Correctional Officers Association said they had heard rumors of potential closures and had requested to meet with the Commissioner to discuss these rumors. In two separate meetings on July 1 and July 7 the Commissioner clearly stated to ACOA that no decisions had been made on closing any institutions and that Correctional Officers and ACOA would be part of the vetting process.

ACOA stated in a news release they had tried to schedule more meetings to receive information, but was continuously put off. Then, Tuesday morning, without warning and without having been given the opportunity to provide input, ACOA read that Palmer Correctional Center would be closed. According to ACOA, the Commissioner stated that he wanted Officers and the public involved in the decision, then acted behind closed doors and without taking input on the closure. Now the Commissioner is asking for input from Officers on how to enact his unilateral decision said ACOA.

Correctional Officers, just like all State employees, deserve to know what is happening with their jobs stated ACOA in a news release. That is why the Legislature thoroughly vets any cuts before they are made to a Department. Tuesday’s announcement completely circumvents the Legislative and public process said ACOA.

Brad Wilson, ACOA Business Manager said, “Despite telling Officers that the decisions would be transparent, the Commissioner put off Correctional Officers for weeks saying that they were ‘not sure’ and ‘no decisions have been made’ and then surprised all Officers today by announcing that Palmer Correctional Center was closing.”

APOC stated that as far as they know, no cost analysis has been seen by the Legislature or the Public. This is a short-sighted decision which will have a long-lasting, negative cost impact on the Department of Corrections according to APOC.

According to the office of the Alaska Department of Corrections. the plan to close the facility will be conducted in phases: Palmer Correctional Center’s minimum-security side (176 hard beds and 25 staff members) will shut down first. Many of the minimum-security prisoners will be moved to Pt. Mackenzie Correctional Farm, which is more conducive to transitional living. Inmates will learn valuable life skills, working with their hands, producing useful products, engaging with community volunteers and creating a better, peer-level environment to transition back to civilian society. A fully operational Pt. Mackenzie Correctional Farm will not only help the Department produce its own food, but will also provide a venue for local farmers to sell their excess produce every season to DOC for processing. - More...
Thursday PM - July 28, 2016

Alaska: New rare species of whale identified - An international team of scientists who searched out specimens from museums and remote Arctic islands has identified a rare new species of beaked whale that ranges from northern Japan across the Pacific Ocean to Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

In 2004 Reid Brewer of the University of Alaska Southeast measured an unusual beaked whale that turned up dead in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. A tissue sample from the carcass later showed that the whale was one of the newly identified species.
CREDIT: Don Graves

Japanese whalers call the enigmatic black whales "karasu," the Japanese word for raven. The new species is darker in color and about two-thirds the size of the more common Baird's beaked whale, but so scarce that even whalers rarely see them.

A DNA analysis of 178 beaked whales from around the Pacific Rim found eight known examples of the new species, the scientists reported today in the journal Marine Mammal Science. The eight included specimens from the Smithsonian Institution and Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, a skeleton on display in an Alaska high school, and another that puzzled researchers trying to identify it when it washed up on an island in the Bering Sea.

"The challenge in documenting the species was simply locating enough specimens to provide convincing evidence," said Phillip Morin, a research molecular biologist at NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center, and lead author of the new study. "Clearly this species is very rare, and reminds us how much we have to learn about the ocean and even some of its largest inhabitants."

An earlier Japanese study had suggested that the black whales, sometimes considered a dwarf form of Baird's beaked whale, might represent a new species. That sent Morin in search of additional genetic samples to definitively answer the question and better understand the range of the elusive species.

He turned first to the Southwest Fisheries Science Center's marine mammal tissue collection, the largest in the world, and found two samples that appeared to represent a new species. One came from a whale found in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in 2004, whose skeleton now hangs on display at Unalaska High School. Then he and his colleagues pursued additional DNA samples from museums, research institutions and Japanese markets where whale meat is sold.

In 2014 scientists found a dead beaked whale on St. George Island, one of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. When it did not match any known species, they sent samples to Morin. Genetic tests later showed it to be the new species.

"We knew it was not any whale we knew from our area," said Michelle Ridgway, a marine ecologist with Oceanus Alaska who documented the whale in the Pribilofs and is a coauthor of the new research. - More...
Thursday PM - July 28, 2016