Both of Alaska's U.S. Senators are pushing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to stop the proposed Eielson F-16 move to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage.
This comes as the Anchorage School District is preparing for as many as 1,000 students who could join the school district.
The move would mean relocating around 500 service men and women, and their families, but a Major Joseph Coslett with JBER said housing on JBER is close to capacity.
“By fiscal year 2013, we’ll have roughly 3,200 housing units. The occupancy rate has been on average 97%,” said Coslett.
Because there may be no room on base, an Anchorage School District demographer Elisabeth Goodman said data shows up to 1,000 K-12 students could move to outside the JBER base somewhere in the Anchorage bowl.
Goodman says the data she has to work with is very limited, but she estimates around 500 would actually relocate here, predicting families would move to the Eagle River and Chugiak area or northeast Anchorage.
“We're really just looking at the student data we have available. It could be as simple as a military connected flag,” said Goodman. “Data is very limited when trying to analyze who is at risk moving from one base to another.”
According to a Pacific Air Forces report, equipment is recommended to begin moving to JBER at the beginning of next year, and personnel starting to move in April.
Superintendent Carol Comeau said the challenge would be if students start coming in after the fiscal year begins, in October, when funding is locked in for the next year, but she says the district can accommodate those additional students.
“We would have to go back to the school board and say this is an emergency for the rest of the year we need to hire this amount of teachers to accommodate these students. Therefore, we need to use one-time money to get us through the year, but then we would be building it into the ongoing costs for the following year, which we would generate the revenue for.”
